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Ask HN: Export Apple Notes as a Hugo Blog?

6 points by reacharavindh ↗ HN
I use Apple Notes as my “Note down what ever” tool. It has a lot of useful notes that I wish I could deploy as a blog. I can’t seem to find a way to export Notes in anyway other than PDFs. Does anyone have any tips for me? It should be able to handle the images I have “paste”ed into the Notes.

I saw Montaigne.io on my Google search, but I want to avoid it because of the lock-in. I want something that I can self-host/hack on.

8 comments

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slater
Maybe there's a workflow you could set up in Automator.app?
yawpitch
Consider looking at Bear, who seem to have a workaround?

https://bear.app/faq/Import%20%26%20export/Migrate%20from%20...

My personal experience with Hugo was emphatically not great, and my recent re-experience with it has been worse… the sunk cost fallacy is powerful, so while I’m sure you could do it with Hugo, I’m not going to recommend you try it.

https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/

tikkun
What would you suggest instead - raw HTML/CSS, or something else?
yawpitch
Honestly if you don’t have a lot of content and your needs and aesthetics don’t precisely shoehorn one of the relatively few functioning themes, your before-minimum-viable experience of an SSG is going to be writing raw HTML + CSS, anyway, multiplied by an esoteric, never portable template language and whatever backwards incompatible changes the SSG makes as it seemingly inevitably tries to grow beyond its britches.

In hindsight, I’d have gotten my ideas out there quicker, and - excepting pandemic-derailing - stuck with my goals longer, had I just written raw HTML + CSS.

oneearedrabbit
I built a similar tool you are describing. A quick demo and a technical post is here: https://notespub.com/. However, truth be told, I migrated off Notes to Emacs Org-mode recently and didn't finish the project for GA. If it helps, I do plan to release it on Github soon-ish.

If you are willing to go the extra mile, it is not that difficult to export Notes with media files from Sqlite and templatize them, and I am happy to help.

tikkun
If you search on HN and on Github there are a few Apple Notes exporting things people have built.
shanecleveland
I've come across this recently: https://montaigne.io

Seems to be pretty actively developing it.

I have not tried it, but I also use Notes ad my go-to for jotting anything down.