Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog
datanarratives.com
datanarratives.com
I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to publish content from Notion
There is also an open source version for using Notion as CMS.
That can be found at https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x
It's a blog. How can it be that expensive to host a blog, especially if you're just getting started?
Looking at other options - first one come to mind is Card - that's much more affordable.
I am glad you're giving a free trial - that's not a bad deal, at least people can try it before committing.
$15 a month to host a blog vs spending your own time figuring things out and being proud of having built something from an open-source repo (and perhaps contribute some knowledge back like this blogpost OP posted) could be also interesting.
Feel free to change my mind.
Btw, dont wanna sound like an asshole - if I was a business (not an individual) I would purchase from you for sure!
It's $15/month, but you can create any number of blogs with it. Not just a single blog.
There are people paying for it, so yeah, I think it is appealing enough for some people.
I especially get no coders as my customers. They can just whip up a page on Notion, and then instantly publish it to their blog. They get all the analytics, seo optimization, search and many other things out of the box. It's no different than how Ghost blog is charged at. Also, ghost cost is per blog.
My customers are mostly no coders, who don't code, but use Notion in their daily life to write content.
Ability to create multiple blogs is a feature, not the whole value prop of Feather.
$15/mo is already super low, you need to recalibrate what good saas pricing is
But yeah, for some people, especially developers, it can seem a little high.
I will also change the pricing for sure in the future, once I have some business specific features like API access, multiple seats etc.
Just wanted to test the waters, and I was already able to get my first 100 customers, so I know this works. Now I just have to optimize the pricing and work on things that users request.
But as far as I know, you can’t make blogs with Carrd. It’s only for small one page websites.
Some of my customers are using https://carrd.co along with my https://feather.so
Carrd for the landing page and Feather for other pages.
For example,
http://starrt.co -> Made with Carrd
https://starrt.co/blog -> Made with Feather
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https://castrio.me -> Made with Carrd
https://castrio.me/blog -> Made with Feather
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https://indieworldwide.com -> Made with Carrd
https://indieworldwide.com/blog -> Made with Feather
I give the users a Notion template to duplicate. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715...
I will then ask them to pick a domain, add the cname. That’s it. I will then get all the content from their Notion page and build a complete blog from it, with tags, authors, search, site map, rss feed etc.
People can either use that html and render it themselves or I can do it, and give it to them as an iframe. Depends on their use case, people go with either Iframe or manual rendering with code.
Thank you.
Super is a tool to turn Notion pages into websites. Your tool seems extremely similar, but more expensive, so where's the value proposition?
Here are a couple of differences:
Super is for any kind of websites, you can build blogs with it. But it is not made especially for blogs.
Feather on the other hand, is a blogging platform. You can build other websites with it, but it is made especially for creating the blogs.
This positioning helps me with some advantages. Since my product focus is on blogs, I can build features that are especially useful for blogs.
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For example, to create a blog on Feather, you have to duplicate the below template.
https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715...
That's all you have to do. This template already has 4 databases – Content, Pages, Tags and Authors. So, everything you need in a blog are already available in these 4 database.
I fetch content from these 4 databases and build a fresh UI. Here Notion is being used just as a CMS. In Super, it's one-to-one rendering of Notion page.
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In Feather, Notion is just a data source. Feather generates a lot of things on top of regular Notion pages.
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Take https://wizenguides.com/ for example. This is built with Feather.
In this website, a lot of pages are generated by Feather, they are not there in Notion.
1. https://wizenguides.com/ – Home page showing list of articles
2. https://wizenguides.com/collaborators - Authors list page showing list of all authors and number of posts they have written.
3. https://wizenguides.com/thomas-jacquesson – Individual Author page (there is one for each author) showing posts written by that author
4. https://wizenguides.com/topics - Tags list page showing list of all tags
5. https://wizenguides.com/marketing – Individual Tag page (there is one for each tag) showing posts tagged with that tag.
Also, if you open any of the page (like https://wizenguides.com/customer-surveys-for-market-research for example), you can see that it already has table of contents auto-generated on the left side. This toc is not there in Notion page, but I generated it and insert it in that place. Because, it's an article page, and it's expected to have table of contents in an article page, I was able to do this.
Also, if you open any article page, you can see that it has related posts at the bottom. Those related posts are automatically rendered there, based on "Related Posts" property in my Notion template.
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You also get RSS Feed for your posts, Sitemap for your blog, you can do programmatic SEO with Feather, you can do so many other things in Feather. I was able to include all of these features, because I positioned Feather as a blogging platform.
You also get in-built analytics for each of your blog. You don't have to setup or configure anything. I did it because a blog needs analytics and it only makes sense for me to offer it.
I also have an inbuilt form to collect emails from users. Again, because it's a blogging platform.
Once you try out Feather, you will know exactly why it is perfect for blogging.
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Also, in Feather, the pricing is not based on number of sites you create. You can create as many sites as you want with it with a single subscription. So, with $15/month, you can create unlimited blogs, as long as their page views is under 10k. My pricing is based on total page views rather than number of sites. I think it's reasonable to assume that people are getting more value out of the platform if they are getting more pageviews. So, my pricing model is based on pageviews rather than number of sites.
These are some of the reason why I am still getting customers who are creating blogs every month, inspite of Super already existing.
Hope it's clear now. Please let me know if you have any more questions.
How many API calls on a page view? One? Many?
If you are talking about feather.so, it’s a completely different product. In that, the number of page views will be determined based on your Feather plan.
One day I’ll come full circle and be a staff engineer / devops whatever who is just as grumpy as all those sysadmins who mentored me a decade and a half ago.
What's the largest start-up or most compelling start-up that can be built on a bunch of SaaSs taped together?
It's drag/upload images really dies when it's more than a few (on fiber, but that's not the point; in 2022 you need to remember what you were doing when uploading something and keep trying; it simply forgets the image completely and just shows the 'embed image' placeholder without anything in it for the images that 'didn't make it'). It is inconsistent between web, mobile and desktop; for instance, I make a page with 25 images on my desktop, wait for them to fully upload (it always says 100% done in the top but that's a lie; you have to check every photo in the right bottom); if it fails, remove them and doing it again because usually the first 1-2x half of them will just not make it and when done share on web or check on the mobile app, still half are missing even when fully uploaded according to the desktop.
I don't really trust it work reliably for anything but text & links.
Google Docs (until recently?) doesn’t really do links between docs that well.
The slash-based (/) UI in Notion is huge for onboarding. The different content types you can insert are super discoverable compared to Google Docs where you have to dig through the menus.
You can’t fuck with the styles in Notion that much, which prevents people from becoming “format astronauts.”
Notion has an organization-global index (like most wikis) which makes document discovery a bit easier.
Notion has document metadata, which lets you get something like a simple database out of a set of documents. You can have a set of docs with custom fields (due date, point of contact, whatever)
Notion gives you an inbox for notifications when you’re mentioned/stuff gets edited.
Google Docs is catching up on some of this in the last couple years, but IMO they have been sleeping on this space since pretty early in Google Docs development.
It can bulk publish your Google Docs to WordPress also it can create you a blog from Google Docs.
Basically if anyone wants to build an extremely beautifully crafted UI on top of Google Drive/Docs, you could perhaps have the same advantages of Notion in Google Docs (that would be my dream tbh)
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Change my mind.
(I work at Notion, but this content is about my hobby website)
Notion is really the best writing experience out there. You can easily make rich pages of content with video and images, but to add those things in a flat markdown file is a pain!
So I made a workflow that will convert your Notion subpages in a specific page to open a pull request on Github to your blog.
Copy it to your own Pipedream account to use it for free: https://pipedream.com/new?h=tch_OQlfe5
I also put together a quick video to walk through how to set it up: https://youtu.be/HgOWnJSGo6w
Long story short, you just need to connect your Notion & Github accounts to the workflow, and define which Notion page you'd like to sync with Github.
Hope this helps writing a bit more fun!
I get the appeal but you’re stuck with whatever notion decides to do with their platform.
I believe behind the scenes it uses a service called https://usenotioncms.com/ which offers some quality of life improvements over the vanilla Notion api.
You might want to check them out.
We use Notion bc they have a great text writing interface, most of the people we work with are researchers and don't know how to write Markdown, etc. So they either write in Notion or I just paste their Word doc into Notion and it works great.
Whenever there's a new content, I pull all the content from the Notion API and build it into a static Sveltekit site served on Vercel. Everything is super fast. For those saying if Notion goes down or shuts off API access one day, we'll just fall back to the "normal" ways of writing content, all of which are worse UX for both me and the other people writing content.
This is useful for teams that use Notion to write content (such as blog posts of help articles) but use a more traditional CMS to host that content. We use Notion internally for our blog posts and documentation which is hosted on Contentful.
Besides Notion, it also supports exporting content from Google Docs to any of the supported CMSs.
But IMO this is one of Notion's killer features, the fact that it's so flexible you can use it as a dang CMS.
We're very aware of the legacy of Lotus Notes. There are similar concepts between Notion and Lotus Notes - especially v1-v3 of Notes that were focused on end-user programmability, before the "design" menu was removed and Notes pivoted towards a "Rapid Application Development". However, there's numerous substantial differences in our strategy and execution.
For example, we host the Notion backend, avoiding a lot of the agility issues Notes had. We also aren't an email service.
It's like https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x but much less worked on (bare essentials) and doesn't need a server per se, it runs on a serverless worker.
One other helpful thing we've found from Notion is the Kanban view of the database which allows us to move content through various swim lanes; "Approved", "Revision #1", "Published" etc.
If anyone wants a copy of the code, feel free to reach out (contact details in profile). It’s not buttoned up into a GitHub-shareable project but should be easily adaptable.
Oriented for multi-chapter ebooks with images, but no table support.
HN like to talk about how risky it is to use Google products as they will shut down - but this is 10 times riskier.
You depend on a closed system, with no guarantees, for a usage it was not originally designed for. Notion itself can still be alive, but change some feature to kill this usage. Not even intentionally.
Looking at their docs it seems 3 requests per second is the limit, this could easily be reached at peak times for a blog/website with even the slightest bit of traction.
Many of my customers blogs were on the front page of HN multiple times, and no they did not go down.
The reason being I host everything on cloudflare workers and have a Bunny CDN in front of it. So all the Notion content stays in Bunny Edge Storage in the form of JSON.
When you get a visit, I read from Bunny storage/CDN instead of reading directly from Notion. So, yeah, it won't get rate limited.
The exact goal is to have a Notion-like experience combined with a headless CMS, but in one product.
Btw the way we are applying to this YC batch!
It's a tool to easily use Notion as CMS for your docs, blog and changelog websites.
The public API is extremely important to the future of Notion. We maintain date-versioned backwards compatibility similarly to Stripe.
When it comes to your content, you can export your entire Notion workspace (or just the part of it that’s your CMS) as Markdown/CSV or semantic HTML, including all your uploaded assets and files. The HTML export is read to host as-is or post-process with BeautifulSoup, etc.
Investors will want an exit event, sooner than later. IPO (unlikely in next 2 years, macro issues) or flipping it to ... someone.
Just the normal cycle, nothing Notion-specific.
What is the "free" stuff you think would go away? The public API? But, we need to have a public API for many of our customers to be willing to pay us. It's an essential feature.
I’m happy this use case works, it’s a great showcase for how to get data in/out of Notion with their API. But I wouldn’t use it for anything that I couldn’t migrate to a different CMS quickly.
(And yes, I use Notion)