# Publishing Apple Notes as a Website

- Page: https://shared.btbytes.com/p/publishing-apple-notes-as-a-website
- Date: 2024-03-31
- Tags: apple, notes

**Status:** Ideating

Apple Notes ships on all MacOS and iOS devices, and is a quick way to take notes; I have notes that I took 10+ years ago, that have survived many device upgrades.

Notes has many features that makes it a lightweight knowledge management tool  like ability to attach pictures directly from the phone, HTML tables, and most recently - Linking to other notes.

This has me wondering if Notes can be used a lightweight authoring tool for a website. However, notes supports only exporting single note to PDF, and nothing much else.

The first step to this is to export the content into a more web friendly format like HTML (or markdown, whence it can be converted to HTML easily).

The first clue down this road is [apple-notes-to-sqlite](https://github.com/dogsheep/apple-notes-to-sqlite) tool [written by \@simonw](https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript).

The exported `[notes]` table contains HTML in the `body` column:

```sql
CREATE TABLE [notes] (
   [id] TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
   [created] TEXT,
   [updated] TEXT,
   [title] TEXT,
   [body] TEXT
);
```

If one can build a MacOS native app that can directly publish the notes as webpages to a hosting service, then we can see the classic Desktop based web publishing make a come back in a small way.

At the least this NotesPublisher should have the following options:

1. Select which folders to export
2. Select "Home page"
3. Some kind of navigation.

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See also: [yakshaves](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/yakshaves), [sqlite](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/sqlite), [publishing](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/publishing)