Comment by alecrosa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alecrosa | Hacker News Reader

Less than a month ago I decided to build an app for myself to solve a very specific problem:

“I want to be able to take notes on my phone, share some of them online, and publish a few on my personal blog — oh, an I also want an API!”

I built this is because no tool out there satisfied my needs: - Notion had no native app so it's very slow to use on mobile. Plus is too general. - Medium is a disaster for readers, they shouldn't be the ones paying to read. Native app is slow AF. - Most note-taking apps were too complex and feature creep. I wanted speed + power with simplicity first. Just give me markdown. - Apps are either online or offline, none tried to mix those two models seamlessly. - Blogs are either static (I need to be on my laptop and code) or use CMS which are too general and complex.

I sense there’s a demand for an easy to use native note-taking app that can also serve as an online publishing platform. A place where you can use your domain and update your notes right from your phone.

Of course, this is just a theory, so I would love to see if you all find it useful. You can try it https://collectednotes.com

Features:

- Simplicity. - Markdown with live preview. - Custom Domains. - No ads, no tracking, no modals, no vanity, no nonsense. - No data lock-in. Export your notes from day one. - Restful API, Your Notes in different formats. - Native experience iPhone & iPad: Share extension, Quick actions, FaceID, Quick Actions, Keychain, Keyboard shortcuts, Slide Over & Split View, Dark Mode.

Sample note: https://collectednotes.com/blog/api, Would love to hear what you all think

Hey, this looks great.

One thing you might want to consider is having one domain for a website about collectednotes (collectednotes.com) and another for hosting user's blogs (collectednotes.blog for example) because it is currently not clear what urls are official and made by you and which are just blogs made by anyone.

For example, https://collectednotes.com/accounts/ is genuine and made by you whilst https://collectednotes.com/account/ is a blog I just created. To me there seems a very real risk of users being mislead.

On second thoughts, using a sub domain would make way more sense.

+1

In that case: make sure you trust your registrar.

There was a story here a couple of weeks ago or something with a post mortem from someone who got their websites taken offline and access to their mail suspended or taken offline because some automated system at a giant corporation decided so.

It stayed offline for hours because there was no competent humans available with authority to override the clearly (AFAIK) stupid decision made by the system.

Personally a key takeaway from that (except not depending on said company) was to make sure one has at least two domains, preferably with two registrars, and make sure user generated content is not available on the one you depend on for email etc.

Great tip - got a link for the story, by any chance? Or do you remember who the company was, so I can search for it myself?

EDIT: I couldn't find anything directly on point, but I did find this related horror story about a company whose ICANN email contact information no longer worked because the company's contact person had left the company. An ICANN email to the contact person bounced back. ICANN took the entire domain offline. The company's Web person had a lot of trouble getting through to a human at ICANN to straighten things out — and even then: "To make a long story short, my client was required to submit articles of incorporation, bank statements and other documents in order to get the domain working again." [0]

EDIT 2: Thanks to Chris Morgan, who provided a link to a GitBook horror story. [1]

I added both stories to my "Startup Law 101" page [2], with a hat tip to both Erik and Chris.

[0] https://www.skyhoundinternet.com/2017/05/17/website-email-ge...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23516675

[2] https://www.oncontracts.com/startup-law/#Use_a_separate_Web_...

The story in question: https://blog.gitbook.com/tech/post-mortems/06-20-gitbook-dom... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417046).

Note that in that case the user content was on a separate domain—the registrar blocked the entire account.

Oh. Possibly even worse.

(Although I think there might have been some comments about user generated content on the main domain.)

ah good catch thank you

Exactly. Having a bunch of keywords reserved like Twitter does would be handy.

Honestly, sounds like micro.blog and how I use it. Most importantly, micro.blog uses Micropub, an existing W3C standard API for blogging which is why things like Drafts, iAWriter, MarsEdit etc can all support it.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a very cool project and it looks like you’ve done a great job. I would recommend looking into Micropub support though rather than role your own API. The IndieWeb group has worked hard and built up a lot of easy to use and powerful standards around this stuff.

oh cool, didn't knew that existed!

It would be great if there was a good way to find existing projects that achieve what we seek. Usually, the biggest names are visible, and it's hard to find alternatives that achieve specific ideas.

I suspect we need some sort of search engine that helps push us towards the alternate stuff.

Currently google tends to highlight the big sites/authoritative sources etc, and not the smaller blogs/forums/etc as much.

We basically need some filter against the winners that take all. Block off the top 10-20% sites and only show the long tail.

Oddly enough, I find page 2 (and beyond) of Google results to be incredibly different than page 1 in the way that you describe. When shopping, for example, (in normal search, not the Shopping tab) I'll often have heard of every store on page 1 and almost no stores on page 2+. Using default of 10 results per page.

There is a website called alternative.to which kinda does this for most things, it’s user maintained but it works pretty well for most things, but sometimes fails for smaller projects

Look up the HN launch post and read the top level comments promoting other solutions?

Interesting idea. How long is it around I wonder, it feels like it hasn't taken off yet. The bloggers there seem to perhaps come from a similar viewpoint, guardianista, I'd call it. If someone starts blogging what they might feel to be an unacceptable viewpoint, more torygraph what then, I wonder? Is it a curated timeline? Can they censor like Twitter does? What's the essential difference from a free speech point of view between this site and the existing social networks?

Very minor bug report (which I don’t mind at all): during the signup process on mobile, I clicked “premium subscription” and then pressed the back button. The form was wiped, so I had to re-enter my info.

I imagine many people might give up after that, so I just wanted to mention it.

Another minor bug: when toggling private to public on mobile, the drop down menu doesn’t go away after you press public. It also blocks the save button, so it’s not entirely clear how to save. (I eventually figured it out.)

iPhone 8 on safari, if it helps.

This is impressive work. I was up and running in about two minutes, and I’m thinking about upgrading. https://collectednotes.com/shawwn/sample-note

My only hesitation is that it doesn’t feel like “my” notes. They’re my notes on your platform. And I don’t know whether your platform will die tomorrow. But I try to resist such concerns.

Is there a way to export all my data somehow? Also, some way of adding google analytics?

Ah good catch, mobile experience is very MVP, I only focused on the web for desktop use. For mobile iOS native is the way to go I went crazy on the native features :)

Thank you so much!

Oh you can download your notes easily under profile. It will send you a .zip file with all your markdown files!

Google Analytics I won’t add. In fact I don’t even use it for the site. I don’t want to track people. But views counts will come soon.

Well, view counts would work. Cool to hear that I can get the markdown. Is there any way to insert arbitrary html? Then I can put whatever I need.

Maybe as a premium feature under my domain?

Will think about that, what kind of things would you put? I don’t want to become a CMS or geo cities :)

It's mainly to work around bugs in the system. For example:

site: https://www.shawwn.com/thanks

markdown: https://www.shawwn.com/thanks.page

If you "view source" on the markdown page, you'll see:

  Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/theshawwn">@theshawwn</a>

The reason is that [@theshawwn](https://twitter.com/theshawwn) didn't convert into HTML for some reason. I assume the @ character threw it off, and I didn't want to drop what I was doing to figure out why. But there are a million small things like that.

For https://collectednotes.com/shawwn/sample-note, I would put GA into my notes.

It works for me: https://collectednotes.com/blog/twitter-usernames

See markdown: https://collectednotes.com/blog/twitter-usernames.md

Yes, your markdown implementation is fine. Pandoc (the one I use) seemed broken. The HTML was a way of working around the problem.

The main reason to let users inject HTML is that they can add features you don't have. GA is one; mathjax is another.

Hey, I'm really interested in trying your app. However I am unable to sign in via iPhone SE. The small screen means I that cannot tap to sign in with email address - I prefer this over Apple/Google login.

Otherwise so it looks great, I look forward to giving it a go.

Sorry about that, didn't test enough on smaller screens. Will be definitely fixed on the next update. In the meantime you can try the web desktop version!

Great work. UI tip: When reading on mobile browser and rotating the phone the text doesn’t expand to occupy more space like it can. I find myself doing this a lot to read code on my phone so when a site doesn’t adapt to allow me to read it without odd line breaks I usually leave the site.

Oh good catch, thanks!

Any idea what the cause is for that?

It does for me on iPhone, what device/browser are you using?

For me it works as well on Android with Firefox preview and Chrome.

Other really minor bug. In dark mode the [heart] in "Made with [heart] by Alejandro Crosa" isn't visible. (FF Preview)

OOOHHH I have another integration idea for you (i posted about IMGUR account int...)

Your "export from day one" sparked this thought:

Allow access to your gdrive and make a collected notes folder.

two UX: 1. anytime a post is made to collected notes, a backup copy appears in Gdrive/Dropbox/Gist/whatever....

2. Post a thing to the collected docs folder in GDrive and have it slurped and presented in CollectedNotes.MYBLOG.DATE whatever...

I like it.

Your video walkthrough is good.

Can I edit my notes / blog from a desktop?

Yes, the web interface is slick. Very cool.

Thank you! it's very MVP (I started it three weeks ago) so expect it to improve :)

I had to look around for the walkthrough video and later realized that tapping on the icon on the top left launches it. There was no indication or clue for me on mobile that the icon was a link to a video.

Yes!

Cool idea, but I'm never going to keep notes in a proprietary app, even if I can export them. It's just too much of a headache, and the risk at hand is a lot more work on my part should this not be a profitable venture on your part. Notes last for years, and even decades, and the last thing I want to do is reorganize, reindex and republish old notes.

I LOVE this. Such a great and simple service. Perfect example of excellent yet simple execution. I’m very impressed with all the existing features and your roadmap. Ive joined as a paying customer! Looking forward to seeing the minor improvements, but so far very impressed with the 95% quality! Nice work mate!

Does it support images, latex and code highlighting? That's what I need. In principle, I have been looking exactly for something like this.

LaTex not yet the rest here https://collectednotes.com/blog/a-tour-of-the-markdown-synta...

very slick! congrats on launching! how did you do the mock iPhone video in the landing page? love little demos like that.

edit: ah I see from the comments it is https://www.rotato.xyz/

https://www.rotato.xyz/

Maybe extend your video with how notes are stored and retrieved?

where does an Android app lie in your priorities?

People are building one using the API. It ranks after I'm satisfied with iOS + Web where I can iterate fast.

How committed are you to keeping the API open?

Some of the APIs are open and will stay like that forever. Others require premium for now

If you add math support, I'd give it a try

You mean math symbols? Thought about doing that

Yes, please do! My job involves a lot of math, so it a dealbreaker for me when notetaking software doesn't have math support. These days it's very easy to include! The easiest way is to use KaTeX [1] to render math between dollar sign tags for inline math like this $x+y=5$ and for display math like this:

  $$
  \int_a^b f(x) dx
  $$

Many markdown parsers (like markdown-it) have plugins for math support. In the future, I would also heavily recommend looking into using ProseMirror [2] for wysiwyg Markdown editing.

(I'm currently working on adding wysiwyg math editing to ProseMirror -- see the gifs here [3] for an early proof of concept).

[1] https://katex.org/ [2] https://prosemirror.net/ [3] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math

Sold. I’ll take a look.

Awesome! FWIW I currently use a clone [1] of Andy's notes website [2], to which I've added KaTeX support. The biggest feature is the Roam-style bidirectional linking. But your system is sufficiently simpler that I think I'll give it a try, at least for some use cases.

Roam-style bidirectional linking would be cool, but I wonder if it's better to keep it simple for everyone else rather than add very specific features for the few people like me. Your call...

Anyways, cool project! You're definitely making something people want :)

[1] https://github.com/aravindballa/gatsby-theme-andy/

[2] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

Funny enough Andy’s website is one of the reasons I started this. I have bidirectional linking on the roadmap since day one, but not like Roam, I plan to do something different to keep it simple. For me simplicity is number one here :)

Yes, I passionately agree with simplicity as a core principle. This makes me very excited to see how you implement bidirectional linking.

Godspeed!

I've had a bunch of problems with KaTeX, I'd recommend mathjax instead.

What are the problems you've had? I'm about to switch to KaTeX for speed which will take quite a bit of work and this got me spooked.

It replaces my LaTex with unicode symbols that often look shitty, and are usually the wrong size. Also, it sometimes never rendered my equations. Don't let this totally dissuade you, I never really looked into it (switching to mathjax was easier) but I just remember that "out-of-the-box", a lot of things were broken.

fwiw, I haven't had this experience at all. KaTeX has been extremely easy to integrate into my projects with a simple katex.render(my_math_str). Perhaps you had some string encoding issues separate from katex?

Maybe a bit late, but chiming in here to say that prosemirror in general is absolutely amazing. Used it to build my own note taking app, highly recommended.

oh wow prosemirror is awesome, will definitely look into adding it

Thanks for making Notebag, I just tried it out and love how straightforward it is! I hope you'll consider adding math support in the future! Feel free to use my math plugin [1] as a starting point, it's MIT licensed. (still under development, but it's solid enough to use already)

[1] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math

I’d like math symbols too. There are a few libraries that make it “easy” (though I understand it’s rare for a feature to be “easy”).

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