Introduction

Hello my friend. I may assume that some of you also write blog posts. Then the next question for you, how do you author them, what tool/platform do you use? WordPress, Blogger, Medium, anything else? Since I'm software developer and not always try to find easy and straightforward path, I developed my own simple blogging system where all the blog posts are stored in Git repository as markdown files. During the build process they will be compiled into HTML files to easy serve from CDN. However, in this approach there is one single problem, it may not be the most pleasant way to change or create blog post from VS Code or GitHub website. Luckily, my recently developed tool NotesHub solved this puzzle, and this post is meant to open the curtain behind my new project.

Birth of the idea

I started thinking about the idea of my new side project in late Fall 2020. The main driver was the dislike of some core principals of OneNote, at that moment the primary note-taking app for my personal needs. I like everything to be in order, to match styles and it's not an easy task when you deal with such apps like OneNote. When you copy-paste a text from the browser it will preserve all the styles including font colors, font sizes, etc. As a result, you will end-up when all your notes look different. You may see echoing of style preserving also when you look at your notes on mobile device, and see horizontal scroll to appear, where I would only expect vertical scrolling. The second annoying thing for me is that it's too easy to change something, I had several times when I changed the notes by accident and then realized it too late. Don't put me wrong, OneNote is amazing application. It has a lot of strengths like supporting real-time collaboration, writing with stylus and many more, however those benefits are not really important for me, and disadvantages appeared to overweight everything else.

I started looking for alternatives. Since I'm already familiar with Markdown, it become the first think to come into my mind as format for notes. Markdown solves the problem with styles since it has limited formatting options. For instance, you can't change font face, color, size just with syntax itself, that is exactly what I needed. By searching in App Store, I found GitJournal application which kind of what I was looking for. When I showed it for my wife, she said that it's not good enough to pay for it. My response was: "Ok, challenge accepted, I'll write my own app". That event become the starting point for NotesHub project.