Apple notes is my CMS

Introduction

You may have already come across this meme and the superiority of Apple Notes.

Well, what if you could use it as a CMS to manage the content of your blog? That’s what I wanted to try for my « Today I learned » website. Here is the end result at https://til.julienc.me

Querying Apple Notes

We need a way to fetch the notes from Apple Notes. To do so, we’ll use Anyquery, it’s a SQL database that can query almost anything, including Apple Notes.

1. Install Anyquery at https://anyquery.dev/docs/#installation
2. Install the Apple Notes plugin: anyquery install notes

3. Query our notes using SQL and save it to JSON (in my case, my notes are in the folder TIL)
   

   anyquery -q "SELECT name, html_body, modification_date 
   FROM notes_items WHERE folder = 'TIL';" --json > notes.json 
   

You now have a file notes.json which contains all your notes in an array of objects. Each object has three properties:

• The name of the note (name)
• Its last modified time (modification_date)
• The body note in HTML (html_body)

For example:

[
    {
        "name": "Example",
        "modification_date": "2024-08-11T00:00:00Z",
        "html_body": "<h1>Example</h1><p>This is an example</p>"
    }
]

Our last task is to connect the website to it

Connecting the website

Personally, I’m using Astro.JS. Our first task will be to generate the static path for each entry.
To do so, I can just do import notes from "../../notes.json"; and pass it to export function getStaticPaths(). I’m also using a slugify function to ensure the generated URLs are valid.

// [...blog].astro
import notes from "../../notes.json";

function slugify(string: string) {
    return string
        .toLowerCase()
        .replace(/\s+/g, "-")
        .replace(/[^a-z0-9-]/g, "");
}

export function getStaticPaths() {
    return notes.map((note) => {
        return {
            params: {
                blog: slugify(note.name),
            },
        };
    });
}

const { blog } = Astro.params;
const note = notes.find((note) => slugify(note.name) === blog);

Once paths are generated, we need to write a little bit of CSS to match the Apple Notes style:

article.notes {
            color: #454545;
            font-size: 0.9rem;
            font-style: normal;
            font-weight: 400;
            line-height: normal;
            letter-spacing: -0.015rem;
        }

article.notes > div:first-child > h1 {
        color: #de9807;
        margin-bottom: 0.5rem;
}

... truncated (retrieve the full CSS in the repository at src/styles.css)

We are now done !

Conclusion

Congratulations, you're now using Apple Notes as a CMS. It's a powerful, collaborative CMS that is just bound to your iCloud storage limits. You can add images, tables, formatted text, code, etc.
Here is an example of the formatting options:
https://til.julienc.me/example-of-capabilities

You can deploy your own blog from Apple Notes to Vercel by doing the following:

• Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/julien040/apple-notes-cms
• Run npm install or pnpm install
• Run chmod u+x deploy.sh
• Run vercel to init and connect the project
• Run ./deploy.sh to build and push the project to Vercel

Links

Source code: https://github.com/julien040/apple-notes-cms
Result: https://til.julienc.me/