For a long time I have been looking for a personal publishing platform that I enjoy using. I strongly believe that a friction-less writing experience is key to help me write more.

The best online text editor I have used so far is Notion.

I have experience using GitHub Pages built-in support for Jekyll. It is free and relatively easy to use.

Therefore my personal publishing platform will use Notion as an online text editor and GitHub/Jekyll as a publishing platform.

I struggle writing long form articles. Thus I am going to focus on getting comfortable writing very short form texts or micro-posts.

How does my personal publication platform work

In Notion, I created two private databases. One for blog articles, the other for micro-blog posts.

In each DB, I use a Kanban view and group each post by Status : Idea → Draft → Deploy → Published

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When I move a post to Deploy, it means that it is ready to be published. I can now run a GitHub Action workflow to :

  • pull the post from Notion using Notion’s API
  • convert the Notion API JSON response into a markdown file using https://github.com/souvikinator/notion-to-md
  • commit the file to GitHub
  • Publish the updated website to GitHub Pages

The Notion API documentation states that:

Each time you fetch a Notion-hosted file, it includes a temporary public url valid for 1 hour.

This means I cannot reasonably use the S3 link the Notion provides to display images.

I worked around this limitation by downloading images images from S3 to GitHub using notion-to-md as follow.

And that’s it 🙂

So far, I am fairly happy with this publication system. Its source code is available here.