Here’s what may be a new way to use Discourse. Though I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this, I haven’t seen any posts about it.
I’ve started a new private instance of Discourse that is designed to be a notes app replacement. Think of Evernote or OneNote but it’s Discourse and for only a single person.
It occurred to me that all of these notes apps have things like URLs per note, APIs for interacting with the notes, email in, and the ability to share notes with others. But those are all things that Discourse does.
But there are also a lot of things that Discourse has available that are completely unnecessary as a notes collector. Namely, custom branding, Top/New/Unread, # of posts, etc… These aren’t helpful number/lists when you’re the only one looking at it. Which is what led me to creating this theme.
The biggest change is the home logo area. It’s been removed and replaced with three icons:
- Archive - list of latest
- Categories
- Inbox - Uncategorized
The theory is that you’ll typically want to see the topics (notes) you’ve recently edited. Thus, the archive comes first. Buth then you may want to see the categories of notes. And if you just need to get something out quick, you won’t categorize it at all and leave it Uncategorized.
There are a few settings I found helpful to change for this as well. But the big one was the minimum length of title and body. That’s mostly because I sometimes want to capture a quick idea and fill in the details later.
I’m sure this will continue to morph as I use it. So if you have suggestions, I’m all ears.