notes2web

View your notes as a static html site. Browse a live sample of it here.

Why?

I want to be able to view my notes in a more convenient way. I was already writing them in Pandoc markdown and could view them as PDFs but that wasn't quite doing it for me:

• It was inconvenient to flick through multiple files of notes to find the right PDF
• It was annoying to sync to my phone
• PDFs do not scale so they were hard to read on smaller screens
• Probably more reasons I can't think of right now
• Fun

Install

0. Install Pandoc and Pip

   On arch:

   # pacman -S pandoc python-pip
   

1. Run make install as root

Things to Remember Whilst Writing Notes

• notes2web reads the following YAML frontmatter variable:

  • author --- The person(s) who wrote the article
  • tags --- A YAML list of tags which the article relates to - this is used for browsing and also searching
  • title --- The title of the article
  • uuid --- A unique identifier used for permalinks. More below.

• notes2web indexes ATX-style headings for searching

• notes2web attempts to display file history through the git log command

• notes2web looks for the plaintext file LICENSE in the root directory of your notes

  This is optional but if you would like to add a license you can find one here.

Permalinks

Permalinks are currently rather basic and requires JavaScript to be enabled on the local computer. In order to identify documents between file changes, a unique identifier is used to identify a file.

This unique identifier can be generated using the uuidgen command in the uuid-runtime package or str(uuid.uuid()) in the uuid python package.

The included n2w_add_uuid.py will add a UUID to a markdown file which does not have a UUID in it already. Combine it with find to UUIDify all your markdown files (but make a backup first).

CLI Usage

$ notes2web.py notes_directory

Output of notes2web.py --help:

usage: notes2web.py [-h] [-o OUTPUT_DIR] [-t TEMPLATE] [-H TEMPLATE_TEXT_HEAD]
                    [-f TEMPLATE_TEXT_FOOT] [-i TEMPLATE_INDEX_HEAD]
                    [-I TEMPLATE_INDEX_FOOT] [-s STYLESHEET]
                    [--home_index HOME_INDEX] [-e EXTRA_INDEX_CONTENT]
                    [-n INDEX_ARTICLE_NAMES] [-F] [--fuse FUSE]
                    [--searchjs SEARCHJS]
                    notes

positional arguments:
  notes

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT_DIR, --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR
  -t TEMPLATE, --template TEMPLATE
  -H TEMPLATE_TEXT_HEAD, --template-text-head TEMPLATE_TEXT_HEAD
  -f TEMPLATE_TEXT_FOOT, --template-text-foot TEMPLATE_TEXT_FOOT
  -i TEMPLATE_INDEX_HEAD, --template-index-head TEMPLATE_INDEX_HEAD
  -I TEMPLATE_INDEX_FOOT, --template-index-foot TEMPLATE_INDEX_FOOT
  -s STYLESHEET, --stylesheet STYLESHEET
  --home_index HOME_INDEX
  -e EXTRA_INDEX_CONTENT, --extra-index-content EXTRA_INDEX_CONTENT
  -n INDEX_ARTICLE_NAMES, --index-article-names INDEX_ARTICLE_NAMES
  -F, --force           Generate new output html even if source file was
                        modified before output html
  --fuse FUSE
  --searchjs SEARCHJS

The command will generate a website in the output-dir directory (./web by default). It will then generate a list of all note files and put it in index.html.

Then you just have to point a webserver at output-dir.

Uninstall

# make uninstall

Acknowledgements

Default synatx highlighting is based off Pygments' default theme and made using Pandoc v2.7.2. I found the theme here.

Pretty sure the link colours are taken from thebestmotherfucking.website.