Adventures with Notenik

This is the summaries-only page for the Notenik blog, titled Adventures with Notenik. Below you'll find the latest posts, starting with the most recent. You can also access the entire set of posts, organized by tags.

Keep abreast of the latest Adventures by subscribing to one of our web feeds, available in Atom, RSS and JSON formats.

Notenik Review by AppAddict

Adventure # 35 • Sunday, October 6, 2024

Notenik received a nice review recently from Lou Plummer, on his AppAddict page.

Importing a Quotation from WikiQuote

Adventure # 34 • Monday, September 30, 2024

Notenik can now import selected quotations from WikiQuote.org, hopefully saving time and potential data entry errors.

Why Is the Notenik File Format Different?

Adventure # 33 • Monday, September 23, 2024

Notenik supports MultiMarkdown metadata and YAML frontmatter, but has a preference for its own file format. If this seems a bit of a mystery to you, then read on.

Why Notenik is Shrouded in Perpetual Obscurity

Adventure # 32 • Monday, September 9, 2024

When people finally stumble across Notenik, they often ask “How have I never heard of this before?” Well, here’s where I provide a definitive answer to that question.

Notenik vs. Junkification

Adventure # 31 • Friday, September 6, 2024

How Notenik is designed for “the long flourishing” recommended by David Brooks, rather than the cheap and easy hits so prevalent in modern American life.

Inline Hashtags and Postel's Law

Adventure # 30 • Wednesday, September 4, 2024

How do we tag our notes? Let me count the ways….

Notenik's Split Personality

Adventure # 29 • Friday, August 30, 2024

Is it yet another “just a bunch of text files” app? Or is it a personal database system for the Mac? Well, a bit of both, to be honest.

A Dedicated Outline Tab

Adventure # 28 • Thursday, August 22, 2024

Notenik Version 15.1.0 has just been released into the Mac App Store, and it includes a new, optional, Outline tab that can be displayed when using the Seq and Level fields to build an outline.

Dragging and Dropping Into an Outline

Adventure # 27 • Sunday, August 18, 2024

Notenik supports drag and drop in many situations, and two of them are especially suited for use with outlining.

read more • tags: outlines

Indenting and Outdenting Outline Entries

Adventure # 26 • Friday, August 16, 2024

Notenik makes it easy to indent or outdent a single note or a range of notes.

read more • tags: outlines

Indentation to Show Outline Levels

Adventure # 25 • Thursday, August 15, 2024

When you sort by Seq + Title, Notenik will automatically pad the Title field display on the List tab to create indentation reflective of your overall outline structure.

read more • tags: outlines

Incrementing an Existing Sequence Number

Adventure # 24 • Wednesday, August 14, 2024

I’ve talked previously about Automatically Incrementing Sequence Numbers for new notes, using any of several different methods. But what if you want to insert something new in the middle somewhere? Here’s the answer to that problem.

Changing Adventure URLs

Adventure # 23 • Wednesday, August 14, 2024

I’m making a few changes to the Adventures blog. Most significantly, the blog post URLs are changing, dropping dates in favor of simple titles.

Automatically Incrementing Sequence Numbers

Adventure # 22 • Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Notenik offers three slightly different approaches to adding Notes in sequence, such that Notenik will automatically increment your Seq values as you go.

read more • tags: fields.seq, outlines

Outlining with Notenik

Adventure # 21 • Monday, August 12, 2024

Notenik has two special metadata fields — Seq and Level — that can easily be used to structure a collection of notes into an outline.

read more • tags: outlines

Formatting a Quote Attribution with Notenik 15.0.0

Adventure # 20 • Sunday, August 4, 2024

This latest release of Notenik now provides a handy new Markdown extension that can be used to nicely format an attribution line following a blockquote.

Leveraging Commonplace Entries

Adventure # 19 • Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Once you have a commonplace book, what can you do with it? Here’s where all that hard work pays off, if you’re using Notenik.

Commonplace Data

Adventure # 18 • Monday, July 29, 2024

Once you’ve committed to starting a commonplace book, and then decided to store your book in plain text files formatted with Markdown, then the next question is: what data do you want to collect as part of each entry?

read more • tags: commonplace, fields, lookup

Storage Medium for a Commonplace Book

Adventure # 17 • Sunday, July 28, 2024

Once you’ve committed to starting a commonplace book, your first question will be: how should I store it? I think there’s really only one good answer here.

Commonplacing with Notenik

Adventure # 16 • Saturday, July 27, 2024

As one reviewer on the US Mac App Store says, Notenik “is flexible enough to fit any number of use cases, from the simple to the complex.” But certainly one of my core use cases for Notenik is storage of a commonplace book.

Eating My Own Dogfood

Adventure # 15 • Friday, July 19, 2024

I’ll tell you a little secret – even if no one else in the world was using Notenik, I would still continue to work on it, just because I want to use it.

Let's Talk Metadata

Adventure # 17 • Thursday, July 18, 2024

Let’s talk metadata for a minute. You might call it front matter. But Notenik has supported such fields for over ten years, and has a rich set of functionality to make use of this info.

Custom Display Mode

Adventure # 13 • Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Notenik 14.9.0 adds a new custom display mode.

Mac Menus

Adventure # 12 • Tuesday, July 16, 2024

There are some nice side benefits to Notenik’s use of traditional Mac menus.

Three Types of Merge Templates

Adventure # 11 • Monday, July 15, 2024

Notenik supports essentially three different types of merge templates. Learn what each one is used for, and how they differ from one another.

Use Merge Templates to Format Output

Adventure # 10 • Friday, July 12, 2024

Merge Templates are one of Notenik’s most powerful features, because they allow you to easily format the data in your Notes into any output format that can be expressed within a text file. HTML, XML, JSON, CSV, tab-delimited and plain text files can all be generated easily, whenever you like.

Cross-Posting to Mastodon

Adventure # 9 • Thursday, July 11, 2024

It’s taken a few tries to get this working but from now on I believe all of the Adventures with Notenik blog posts (starting with this one!) should be automatically cross-posting to @notenik@mastodon.social.

How To Build A Website

Adventure # 8 • Wednesday, July 10, 2024

I’ve used Notenik to build several different websites. Here’s the general workflow that I use.

Using Match-Merge Logic in Notenik

Adventure # 7 • Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Notenik has a powerful ability to apply match-merge logic to an imported data set. Here’s how it works.

read more • tags: commonplace, csv, import, lookup, match, merge

Notenik 201 Video Now Available

Adventure # 6 • Monday, July 8, 2024

Due to popular demand, there’s now a second Notenik video available! Hopefully it won’t take me another two years before I tackle the next one!

Adding a JSON Feed to Your Site

Adventure # 5 • Sunday, July 7, 2024

A JSON feed is another kind of web feed that you can add to your site using Notenik. Here’s an example of how you might do that.

read more • tags: datacount, datamax, feed, json

Adding an Atom Feed to Your Site

Adventure # 4 • Saturday, July 6, 2024

An Atom feed is another kind of web feed that you can use on your site. This is newer than RSS, and is also XML-based.

Adding an RSS Feed to Your Site

Adventure # 3 • Friday, July 5, 2024

An RSS feed is one kind of web feed that you can use on your site. This is the oldest of the various feed formats, and is XML-based.

Adding a Web Feed to Your Site

Adventure # 2 • Thursday, July 4, 2024

If you have a website to which you regularly add content, then at some point you will probably want to add a web feed to your site. You can use a combination of Notenik’s Script files and Merge templates to easily generate such web feeds, in any or all of the major formats. It’s always been possible to do this sort of counting with Notenik, but a system variable called datacount now makes this easier than ever.

read more • tags: datacount, feed, rss, scripting

Introduction

Adventure # 1 • Wednesday, July 3, 2024

A brief intro to some of my adventures with Notenik, and with software development more generally, as well as a summary of expectations for this blog.