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Digital Gardening with Notion

Digital gardening without breaking a sweat.

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digital garden

Last updated on June 9th, 2022

Digital Gardening with Notion
A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. — Ness Labs
 

I had a lot of options to choose from when I decided to build a digital garden. I could’ve used a third-party content management system like Wordpress, a self-hosted one like Strapi, built my own with a custom frontend connected to a database like Supabase, or hosted my content directly within my app using Markdown.

At the time, the simplest approach was Markdown but it turns out I don’t really like writing Markdown from scratch, so I needed an editor. It’s not that hard to build your own cms these days so I decided to go for it with the Supabase approach. I setup Tiptap as my editor, hooked it up to my database and built a simple frontend.

This approach was nice but after creating my first post, I realized I was doing most of my writing inside Notion and then copying the content over to my cms. Then it clicked that I could just use Notion as my cms 🤦🏽‍♀️!

I’d remembered that Notion had an api so I went straight to Notion API, created a new integration, Googled “notion vue” (I reach for Vue by default), installed and configured Vue-Notion, created a new Notion table and violà! Migrated to Notion in less than 20 minutes and it was exactly what I needed and hoped it would be. Now I can effortlessly publish notes, edit them in real-time and not have to repeat myself; wonderful! 😁

This solution is perfect if you already use Notion, Notion is the best 💜.