Notion is a note taking app that stores your notes in the cloud. It has multiple options to manage said notes (either hierarchical or in "databases"), provides a complete set of basic text formatting options which are focused on function over form. It allows for instant publishing of specific notes online, but can it be used as a blogging platform?
Date: 2021/10/28
Introduction
Notion, has a lot of option for formatting text, but they are focus on function over form, notes once created can be managed by drag and drop, and the database feature allows for a certain degree of organization, templating and cross table relashionships. All in all its a very capable note-taking platform
One of it's feature is the ability to publish (in a custom sub-domain of notion.site) a set of pages and to have them publicly accessible. The published pages look identical to the pages in the notion app, except for a header that contains some navigation elements.
This feature allows the notion platform to be used as a blog engine. But there are a lot of differences from a traditional blogging platform being either a Content Management System (like Wordpress) or a Static Site Generator (like Jekyll)
The bad
The main consideration is that, as a blogging platform, Notion is extremely opinionated. Especially regarding the navigation around the blog, there aren't a lot of options. (ie Horizontal menus must be created using single line columns), Also there are no text alignment options (align left, without justification is the only option currently available) - And the only font selection is between sans-serif and serif.
The good
So why should anyone consider notion as a viable logging platform? Assuming one can tolerate the restrictions, notion is one of the simpler platforms to setup and easier to use. The editing experience is fluid, there is a decent build in spell checker and publishing a new page (or post) is as simple as dragging the notion page into the hierarchy of an already published page. The lack of visual styling options is a liberating one (assuming one can tolerate it) and allows the writer to focus on the content.
This site is an example of a notion-based site.