Is there an easy and free way for me to host a website specifically for displaying college notes? Some of my peers have created a repository of notes and content and stored them in a shareable Google Drive folder. I, however, wish to share my notes in a format more practical than just a cloud storage directory, similar to those of code library documentation sites.
My requirements are as follows.
- I want the website to allow categorization of notes into courses and units or deeper if necessary.
- The notes should support file formats like PDF, images, markdown, HTML or a combination of any of them.
- I should be able to add and edit the notes from any device at any time.
Is there any pre-made software for this purpose or do I have to create a website and a workflow myself? I am fine with either of them as long as the above requirements are met in a convenient manner.
Check the self-hosted communities, this is a regular discussion there. I use OneNote and would like to get away from it, but every solution is a mixed bag.
A couple options off the top of my head:
Silver Bullet A note-taking app that supports linking. You’d need to host it on a VPS (that’s the simplest approach for your use case, I’d think, with any shared app).
OneNote As students, you probably get Office 365 for a major discount, and honestly OneNote is hard to beat. It syncs to each machine, so everyone has a full copy of a given notebook at any time. Sync is robust, and very slick, with things like showing Author, updates, etc. I do recommend the full OneNote desktop app and not the Windows App nonsense, because the desktop app doesn’t require OneDrive to sync between computers, (though it can use a OneDrive location). To share a notebook on a LAN, you just share the folder it’s in and other machines will sync through the share (I’d create a user just for the notebook/share).
One benefit of a notebook being on OneDrive is the ability to sync to mobile devices (Android and iOS have OneNote apps), and sync doesn’t depend on other devices being online.
To make things easier, you could setup two accounts on OneDrive: a primary account that you manage with the initial notebook(s), and a “user” account that you share your notebook with and then give everyone the credentials for. This will make it easier for others to use, since they won’t have to setup a OneDrive account. You’ll only need to provide a 2FA key for them on initial login - the app will retain the credentials.
I have a love/hate relationship with OneNote. I’ve used it for 15 years now, I’d find it hard to supplant, but I really dislike being tied to a proprietary format, and especially requiring OneDrive for mobile device sync.