Notablog

Generate a minimalistic blog from a Notion table, so you can tell stories of your work with Notion.

Below are some screenshots of Alexander Wang (@dragonman225)'s blog. 🙂

Mobile	Desktop

Management Interface on Notion.so

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• Blog Management Interface
• API Reference
• Notes

Getting Started

Make sure you have Node.js v15.0.0 or higher. Check with command node -v.

For existing users who want to upgrade from v0.3.x, please go through all below steps (do a clean install), except that you can continue to use your Notion table.

1. Install Notablog.

   npm i -g notablog

2. Clone the notablog-starter repository.

   git clone https://github.com/dragonman225/notablog-starter.git

3. Duplicate this Notion table template.

4. Make the table you've duplicated public and copy its URL for the next step.

5. Go into notablog-starter/ directory, open config.json. Replace the value of url with the URL of the table you've duplicated.

6. Inside notablog-starter/ directory, run command:

   notablog generate .

7. After it finishes, go to notablog-starter/public/ directory, open index.html with a browser to preview your site.

• Optionally, you could change the previewBrowser field in config.json to the path of a browser executable you have on your computer and issue the following command anywhere to preview.

  notablog preview <path_to_the_notablog-starter>

Congratulations! Your website is ready now!

• You can copy files in notablog-starter/public/ directory to a server or upload them to any static hosting service to share your content with the world.

• Whenever you want to update your site, go into notablog-starter/ directory and issue command notablog generate ., or issue the command from outside notablog-starter/ with the pattern notablog generate <path_to_the_notablog-starter>.

• Some options for static hosting services:

  • Github Pages
  • Netlify
  • surge.sh

• Some options for self-hosting:

  • nginx
  • lighttpd
  • Apache httpd

Blog Management Interface

This is the documentation of Notion table template

Column Name	Property Type	Description
title	Title	The page title.
tags	Multi-Select	Topics related to the page.
publish	Checkbox	Determine if a page should be rendered.
inMenu	Checkbox	Determine if a page should appear in the navigation bar.
inList	Checkbox	Determine if a page should appear in the article list.
template	Select	Specify which template to use for the page. Available template names depend on the theme you use.
url	Text	A string to be used as the filename and the URL of the generated page. It should not contain / and \. If it's empty, the id of the page is used.
description	Text	Short intro of the page. Styles are working.
date	Date	User customizable date, convenient for importing posts from other platforms or adjusting the order of posts.

• Tip: Check publish but leave inMenu and inList unchecked to make a page seem like hidden because people can only view it when they know its URL.

API Reference

Introduction

Notablog is a command-line tool that works on a notablog-starter to generate sites. notablog-starter contains user config and customizable themes, and is used to store cached data and generated site. The design is inspired by hexo, a popular static site generator.

Folder Structure of notablog-starter

notablog-starter
├── config.json
├── public
├── cache
└── themes
    ├── pure
    └── pure-ejs

• config.json - User configuration.

  Field	Type	Description
  url	string	The URL of a Notion table compatible with Notablog.
  theme	string	The theme to use. It should be one of the folder names in themes/.
  previewBrowser	string	The path to the browser executable for previewing.
  autoSlug	boolean	Generate URL slugs for pages without custom ones.
  locales	string/string[]	The locales which are used to generate string of a date (passed as first argument to Date.prototype.toLocaleDateString())

• public/ - Contains generated static assets.

• cache/ - Stores cached NAST representation of Notion pages. When running notablog generate ..., if a page is not updated since last run, Notablog use the cached data to render.

• themes/ - Stores themes.

Theme

A theme contains layout templates, CSS files, fonts, and other assets that shapes the style and look of a blog.

Folder Structure

<name>
├── layouts
├── assets
└── manifest.json

• <name> - Theme folder name, also the name to be used in notablog-starter/config.json.

• layouts/ - Contains page templates. It is required to have one index layout (index.html), one post layout (post.html), and one tag layout (tag.html). You can have more templates, and a user can use them by specifying the template's filename in template column on Notion table.

• assets/ - Other assets. Anything in this folder will be copied to notablog-starter/public/ when running notablog generate ....

• manifest.json - Theme configuration.

  Field	Type	Description
  notablogVersion	string	Supported Notablog version.
  templateEngine	string	The template engine to use, depending on the template language you use. Currently only "ejs" is valid.

Template Language

• Currently only EJS, but it's possible to support more since there's an interface designed for extension. Open an issue if you would like to contribute.

• Template index.html gets the following object:

  {
    siteMeta: SiteContext
  }

• Template tag.html gets the following object:

  {
    siteMeta: SiteContext
    tagName: string
    pages: PageMetadata[]
  }

• Template post.html or others gets the following object:

  {
    siteMeta: SiteContext
    post: PageMetadata & { contentHTML: string } // All properties of PageMetadata plus contentHTML.
  }

It is highly recommended to take a look at the default theme "pure-ejs" if you want to make your own!

Notes

Code Structure

Generated by dependency-cruiser NPM package.

Project Status

See https://dragonman225.js.org/notablog-stat.html