Wish you had ONE place to post your digital notes? While I keep a handwritten notebook or 10 around the house to keep track of my notes, usually ones that I want to process nice and slow, there are some things you just copy-n-paste. That place, if it’s not a blog, is (or was) my account on SimpleNote.com. That is, until recently, when I found myself unable to login via my computer’s web browsers.
Photo by Romson Preechawit on Unsplash
Not just locked out of one browser because of errant cookies, but all of them. I know, I tried. The ReCaptcha for SimpleNote.com must be set wrong or something, because it rejected every attempt I made. After one session, I doubted if I knew what motorcycles and bicycles and buses looked like, really. I even found a forum on SimpleNote.com’s website where others had been experiencing issues exactly the same as mine.
Hasta la Vista, SImpleNote
Although I have a few shared notes on SimpleNote.com, it was a quick, easy place to access from anywhere and drop notes I could then share with others. That’s the part that bugs me, not being able to quickly share content with a colleague. It’s not the only place, but I’d gotten accustomed to using SimpleNote.com from any device. Now, I can only access it from my iPhone. Until the issue gets resolved, I migrated all my notes via copy-n-paste on my mobile app to a new solution. That was NOT fun.
Revisiting Joplin
With that in mind, I jumped back into Joplin, a free open source note-taking tool. You can choose to pay for Joplin Cloud, or use it at no cost on your desktop and mobile device.
Joplin has made some major improvements since I last explored it a few years ago, and I am considering jumping into Joplin Cloud given all the enhancements it’s made. I am excited about the idea of doing my composing for this blog in Joplin, then copy-n-pasting into micro.blog.
Markdown has become all the more important given its one of the formats AI can export content to. It’s also the format for micro.blog (thank goodness), and that’s pretty fantastic.
Joplin Features
Some features of this versatile tool include:
- Access your notes from your computer, phone or tablet by synchronising with various services, including Joplin Cloud, Dropbox and OneDrive. The app is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. A terminal app is also available!
- Images, videos, PDFs and audio files are supported. Create math expressions and diagrams directly from the app. Take photos with the mobile app and save them to a note.
- Save web pages as notes. Use the web clipper extension, available on Chrome and Firefox, to save web pages or take screenshots as notes.
- The app is open source and your notes are saved to an open format, so you’ll always have access to them. Uses End-To-End Encryption (E2EE) to secure your notes and ensure no-one but yourself can access them.
- Customise the app with plugins, custom themes and multiple text editors (Rich Text or Markdown). Or create your own scripts and plugins using the Extension API.