notes-site

Why

This is a personal notes site for all my markdown notes. I wanted a single place to store and access all my notes from any device.

I kept seeing videos about systems and ideas like atomic note-taking (especially with Obsidian), Zettelkasten, Second Brain, etc. These videos convinced me that I should be taking more notes, but these systems seemed too complicated for my needs. I started by trying to put everything in a Google Doc, but it quickly became too long.

I wanted something more lightweight and flexible. I also wanted both private and public notes. And I was bored.

So I made this.

Overview

Notes are stored as markdown files in a private GitHub repository. This lets me edit notes like I'm editing code: Git version control, my VSCode setup, and Vim keybindings. I can also edit notes from my phone if I want to. Notes that I want to be public are marked as public in the frontmatter.

The website lives in a separate public repo. It's built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, deployed on Vercel. It pulls the markdown files from the private repo using the GitHub API. I check the frontmatter of each markdown file to see if it should be public or not. Markdown is converted to HTML using unified with remark and rehype plugins.