I began using Joplin for keeping notes a few months ago; it may have been Mischa of OpenBSD Amsterdam who recommended it, but in any case he raves about it. I’ll admit it’s the note-taking solution I like best so far, and I’ve been through a number of “solutions”.

Joplin has three features which convinced me to adopt it:

• WebDAV as one of the supported cloud services
• Clients for macOS, iOS, and Android
• Markdown syntax for the notes

In addition to different methods for importing and exporting data (I wouldn’t want to lock myself in, would I now), Joplin has an API. It is enabled by launching Joplin’s Web Clipper service via its preferences and listens for HTTP requests on port 41184 by default. The preference page also lists the token required for accessing the API.

Tweets in Joplin

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to collect specific tweets in my notes, and I thought I’d use the API to do so. The Python program can surely be improved upon, but it works well for what I want it to do.

I give it a URL to an individual tweet (it could also go through my favorites, but I don’t necessarily want only favorites), and the utility uses Tweepy to grab the status’ text, downloads its images and uploads these as so-called resources to Joplin, and then creates a new note. The Markdown of the note has image links to Joplin’s resources.

The screenshots show the result: above on macOS, below on iOS.

Joplin’s been very reliable so far, and I hope that doesn’t change with me battering it this way. Updating Joplin is a bit cumbersome on macOS because I have to download and install a .dmg which I then allow macOS to launch, but I can live with that.