GitHub - 29decibel/notes-to-blog: Turn your apple notes folder into blog

2 min read Original article ↗

Turn Apple notes folder to a website

Apple Notes folder: apple-notes

Generated website: generated-website

This is a simple script that turns a folder of your Apple notes into a website.

Installation (MacOS only)

  1. Download the binary:
curl -L https://github.com/29decibel/notes-to-blog/releases/download/v0.1.4/notes-to-blog-mac.tar.gz -o notes-to-blog.tar.gz
  1. Extract the archive:
tar -xzf notes-to-blog.tar.gz
  1. Make it executable:

Usage

notes-to-blog <apple-notes-folder-name> <output-directory>

Example:

notes-to-blog Writing ~/Sites/blog

Development

Making sure you have bun installed.

curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

# install dependencies
bun install

# build binary
bun run build

Free Github Pages

Once you have the static files, you can easily deploy to Github Pages. This folder has a simple publish script that will help you deploy to Github Pages.

  1. Create a new repository your-name/a-blog-from-apple-notes on Github
  2. Clone the repository to your local machine (example: ~/writings/a-blog-from-apple-notes)
  3. Running ./publish will deploy the static files to Github Pages
# publish git repository to Github Pages
./publish ~/writings/a-blog-from-apple-notes

Example site

Here is an example site generated from Apple notes using Github pages (using custom domain):

https://writing.dongbin.li/

What's next

  • Single binary to simplify installation
  • Generate RSS feeds
  • Allow passing to custom CSS
  • Allow more metadata control on each notes

FAQ

Will this send data anywhere?

No. Everything is done locally by running some AppleScript. It then process the exported JSON, then generate the static files.

Why using bun instead of NodeJS?

Exported Apple notes HTML uses base64 encoded images. Which could be huge if the image is big (such as dng raw format). For macOS less than 8GB RAM, it crashed a lot. bun seems to handle this much better. And a lot faster too.