I just wrote a blog post about Joplin

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Hi all,

I just wrote a post about Joplin. In this post, I wrote why I am using it, what the advantages are, and why you should at least give it a try. Obviously I don’t need to convince anyone here. If you have some time, could you please check it out and let me know what you think? It would mean a lot. Thanks a ton in advance.

Here id the link - https://rasulkireev.com/writings/joplin

Best,
Rasul

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Nice article, always happy to see people promoting software like this.

My suggestions:

  • I think you understated sync a bit. Apart from traditional sync via providers, you can use WebDAV, or you can just sync to a folder on your filesystem (which means there are literally no restrictions).
  • Your blog’s audience seems to be developers, so I’d mention the CLI client too, which is a pretty unique feature for note taking apps. This was huge for me.
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Thanks for checking it out. And thanks for suggestions, they are on point! Working to implement them now.

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On this part, there are some caveats to using FileSystem syncing that should be addressed:

  • Not available for mobile devices

  • If the syncing service offers webdav (so that mobile can sync to and from it), the desktop version can go out of sync with mobile if changes are made and the syncing service isn't running locally when Joplin syncs to the file system

  • Some syncing services don't offer official native clients to Linux or Mac. An example is OneDrive: it has a native client for Windows and Mac; there's an unofficial client for Linux that, impo, runs well enough but on many of the systems I've tried it on, it doesn't run as a continuous service without some workarounds. I had to always start the daemon in a terminal before running Joplin or else my changes would never sync properly.

  • Whatever changes are made locally to the file system sync folder will always affect both Joplin and the files on your syncing service's end.

There are some really cool things I'm discovering though with this approach:

  • On full nuking and reinstalling of Joplin, as long as you have the resources folder backed up from the joplin config directory, your filesystem synced directory can be imported into Joplin as RAW md directory. I did find that sometimes the resources had to be relinked and encryption needed to be fully disabled first for this to work properly.

  • You could theoretically backup and sync your notes to multiple syncing services at the same time as long as they are all monitoring the same directory and running at the same time. Your internet connection could be a bottleneck here, but it should work fine. (Could someone braver than I test this out please? Thanks. :smiley:)

3 Likes
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@bedwardly-down, thanks for such a detailed response. I’ve learned a bunch of things about the inner working of Joplin. Hope to contribute to the tool more as the time goes by.

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Hey all,

Sorry if you are seeing a 404 when going to the blog post link. I recently rebuilt the site and decided to make some changes to URL paths. Tha blog post is located at https://rasulkireev.com/joplin.

Best,
Rasul