Obsidian
I finally found the perfect text editor I can use for this website. It's the popular note taking software called Obsidian. It's totally free to use but also have paid features.So far, I find it really amazing as is and I haven't subscribed to any of the paid features yet.
What's great about it? First and foremost, you own your notes. Most note taking apps I've tried don't really let you feel like you own your notes. I remember always feeling anxious and ask myself "What if this company fails? Do I lose my all my notes? What if they get hacked, will my notes be exposed? What if I lose access to my account, will I be locked out forever and say goodbye to my notes?"
Those are just some of the things I'm worried about when using such apps. I've tried several ones and most of them lets you export your files locally, but the formatting aren't really compatible with the others so I can remember having a hard time transferring my notes to another platform. And most of the time, I have hundreds if not thousands of entries.
That's why I'm anxious to try another note taking app. It's a nightmare to transfer to another platform. That's why I decided to create this website. This way, I can control the format of the text, and I totally own my content. I can back it up to wherever and be at peace because I know my notes are safe. Yes, I value my notes a lot.
For these posts, as you can see the URL below the post, I use a weird formatting trick for my posts. It's like a combination of Markdown and HTML.
Disclaimer: I know this process isn't the most efficient or optimized, it's just the one I can easily create at the moment (I'm talking about my skill level).
I use a simple Python script to convert my note into an actual post. The process is, I write the notes using Markdown format, then the Python script will convert it to HTML tags. Another script will then convert all Markdown files into a JavaScript array of objects, which is going to be used to display all of the posts in this website.
The conversion of the posts are still manual process. But it's all good for now, at least I have control over my notes, and it's actually easy to write... I should also say enjoyable.
Going back to Obsidian, what I find great is that my notes are saved locally on my PC as .md files. Originally, I even attempted to create my own sort of CMS, but I couldn't figure out yet how I can do it. I wanted to just create my custom text editor, and the most important feature that I really need is that it can read and write from an existing local folder. That's it. But I'm too lazy to really try and figure out how to do it.
And then I found Obsidian. It does what I actually intend to do. It can read and write files from my folder. I can create new notes and edit existing ones. I can type in Markdown format and it shows the effect of it on my text editor. Then it outputs .md files that I can use directly using my scripts.
Those aren't all the reasons why Obsidian is awesome. I won't go into those details since they are available all over the internet. I just wanted to explain why I like it and how I use it.
So yup, I can see this is going to be a solid app I can use for many years.