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Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

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21–30 of 88 posts

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the risks here aren't any different from those with using the wordpress or ghost apis for a blog. or using any third party api for anything

That’s a bit disingenuous. Notion is still a relatively new company without the track record or ecosystem of either Wordpress or Ghost. And both of these are open source, so if the companies behind them go under, you could still self host. I’m happy this use case works, it’s a great showcase for how to get data in/out of Notion with their API. But I wouldn’t use it for anything that I couldn’t migrate to a different…

fair point re: source availability, but i disagree that it's a reasonable concern. notion is profitable and has been cashflow-positive since day one

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’m doing with Feather is this: I give the users a Notion template to duplicate. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715... I will then ask them to pick a domain, add the cname. That’s it. I will then get all the content from their Notion page and build a complete blog from it, with tags, authors, search, site map, rss feed etc.

For useNotionCMS.com, it’s a little different. It’s an api product. I give the users an api. People send their Notion page link in the api, they will then get all the data related to that page, including the html version of that Notion page. People can either use that html and render it themselves or I can do it, and give it to them as an iframe. Depends on their use case, people go with either Iframe or manual rende…

Why reply to yourself? You can edit your comment on HN.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#23
I use a service called Feather (https://feather.so/) for my blog which uses Notion as a CMS and abstracts away the actual api layer.

I believe behind the scenes it uses a service called https://usenotioncms.com/ which offers some quality of life improvements over the vanilla Notion api.

You might want to check them out.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#24

I built an entire product just for doing this. https://usenotioncms.com I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to publish content from Notion https://feather.so There is also an open source version for using Notion as CMS. That can be found at https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

I use Feather and I love it. Makes for such a convenient writing experience.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For useNotionCMS.com, it’s a little different. It’s an api product. I give the users an api. People send their Notion page link in the api, they will then get all the data related to that page, including the html version of that Notion page. People can either use that html and render it themselves or I can do it, and give it to them as an iframe. Depends on their use case, people go with either Iframe or manual rende…

Why reply to yourself? You can edit your comment on HN.

Got it. It was a habit. Will edit instead, from next time.

Thank you.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#27
post #7

One day you'll all regret this.

that day will come after i've saved more time than it takes to move to a different cms. it's possible i already have

Genuine question: why would you need to move to a different cms? If what you’re using works, why change it?

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#28

Notion hasn't been great for me; I wanted to like it and we got it for our team, but everyone is struggling when doing anything besides text. I used it for blogging, but currently only to actually write them, not publish because of the below issues. It's drag/upload images really dies when it's more than a few (on fiber, but that's not the point; in 2022 you need to remember what you were doing when uploading somethi…

I've struggled to grok Notion and Coda. What are the killer apps? I'm happy with Google Docs.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#29
post #28

Notion hasn't been great for me; I wanted to like it and we got it for our team, but everyone is struggling when doing anything besides text. I used it for blogging, but currently only to actually write them, not publish because of the below issues. It's drag/upload images really dies when it's more than a few (on fiber, but that's not the point; in 2022 you need to remember what you were doing when uploading somethi…

I've struggled to grok Notion and Coda. What are the killer apps? I'm happy with Google Docs.

Notion is Emacs for Gen Z.

__________________________

Change my mind.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#30

I built an entire product just for doing this. https://usenotioncms.com I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to publish content from Notion https://feather.so There is also an open source version for using Notion as CMS. That can be found at https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

I commend you for building a beautiful tool, and your landing page is great. I personally find the pricing quite expensive.

It's a blog. How can it be that expensive to host a blog, especially if you're just getting started?

Looking at other options - first one come to mind is Card - that's much more affordable.

I am glad you're giving a free trial - that's not a bad deal, at least people can try it before committing.

$15 a month to host a blog vs spending your own time figuring things out and being proud of having built something from an open-source repo (and perhaps contribute some knowledge back like this blogpost OP posted) could be also interesting.

Feel free to change my mind.

Btw, dont wanna sound like an asshole - if I was a business (not an individual) I would purchase from you for sure!

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