
Magpie – Git-backed Evernote replacement - charlesthomas
https://magpie-notes.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#what-is-magpie
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lsinger
I use GitHub's gollum [1] git-based markdown-supporting Wiki for pretty much
this. It's easy to add a basic username / password protection. I run it on a
Digital Ocean instance that had some capacity left over and have a cronjob
push to a private bitbucket repo every 30 minutes for backup. I don't have to
create notebooks and can use GitHub-flavored markdown (or other any syntax
gollum supports).

That said, I like basic idea of extending magpie with a PDF scraper and email.
Maybe it would spare some energy to fork gollum and add extension to it to
make it more Evernote-like?

[1]: [https://github.com/gollum/gollum](https://github.com/gollum/gollum)

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general_failure
Is your code for adding auth public? I would love to have the same setup

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lsinger
See here for Basic Auth:
[http://stackoverflow.com/a/13357591/633167](http://stackoverflow.com/a/13357591/633167)

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moonlighter
If you like a native app (OSX, iOS and Windows), take a look at
[http://www.notebooksapp.com](http://www.notebooksapp.com)

It's very clean, allows markdown, and the best feature is that it keeps your
content as files on disk, so even if you stop using the app, you still got
your content (not hidden away in a database). Plus you can easily use dropbox,
rsync or whatever to sync it. It's a really great app.

~~~
pastylegs
This looks great. I've been looking for an offline alternative to Evernote for
a while now. Are there any other decent Mac apps I should consider?

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moonlighter
I used NoteSuite before, but wasn't too happy with it. It's UI is quirky,
tries too hard and gets mostly in your way. Notebooks doesn't fall into that
trap. I'm not aware of others but my research into it wasn't that exhaustive,
so if there are other decent OS X apps I'd love to hear about it too.

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rwbt
I mostly use Evernote for clipping webpages for later reference (images, pdfs
etc). I still haven't found quite an easy to use replacement. Most of the
evernote replacements seem to concentrate only on text/lists.

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cheepin
Ever tried Dragdis?

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jclos
Dragdis looks amazing, but do you know of any offline alternative? I don't
trust anything that lives purely online anymore.

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joshdance
Cool project, looks fun.

Just a note, any 'Evernote' replacement that uses any sort of markdown or
markup language is not a true replacement, but an 'Evernote inspired' project.
Most people don't want to learn markup languages. Rich text editors are the
well established norm and any true Evernote replacement needs to have one.

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zellyn
It would be lovely to have this running on top of Camlistore, rather than git.
A little more automatic, linkable, etc.

~~~
charlesthomas
I'm not familiar with Camlistore, I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the
suggestion.

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orthecreedence
> I love Evernote, but I no longer trust my data to cloud providers.

Give [https://turtl.it](https://turtl.it) a shot as well. Aims to solve this
very problem: Evernote with data privacy. (Disclaimer, I built it.
Disclaimer2: not nearly as advanced as Evernote).

That said, Magpie looks _really_ cool.

~~~
drivingmenuts
So, the Magpie creator no longer trusts cloud providers, yet the software
stores data on github. You know that record scratch sound? I think I just
heard that.

Yes, I know one could configure one's own github repo and make it accessible,
etc. I know that cloud storage is about as reliable as that shaky cousin who's
always borrowing "a few bucks for beer, man."

It seems like everyone is attacking the wrong problem. The problem is not the
client, that's just a UI/UX issue that's never going to be resolved because,
hey, I hate what you like and vice-versa.

Can someone please create a more reliable back-end so we can stop saying
things like "I hate cloud providers"? I hate them, too, but I'm not going to
redesign the part where the problem ain't.

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wtetzner
It's backed by a git repo. I didn't read anywhere on there that it stores the
repo on github.

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deeteecee
just a small question here but essentially it would only a local repo? i don't
know too much about git but if you don't store it on the cloud, how would you
transfer it from computer A to B? (using a repo and not copying folders over)

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sosborn
You can host the repo on any accessible server. Github is an option, but so it
a VPS under your control and not open to the public.

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DrinkWater
The paragraph "What isn’t magpie?" clearly lists why magpie is NOT an Evernote
replacement, yet on the top of the page it says "Git-backed Evernote
replacement".

Stop using the word 'replacement' when in actuality you mean 'clone (wip)'

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corbinpage
It doesn't resolve your fear of cloud providers, but Simplenote
([http://simplenote.com/](http://simplenote.com/)) is an awesome, simple
Evernote replacer. Especially is you trust the folks at Automattic!

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yitchelle
Simplenote looks great. Any idea how they make money? On their front page, it
says "Backups, syncing, sharing — it’s all completely free."

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lips
It started as Simplenote, but was acquired (methinks) by Automattic
(WordPress) at some point, and the underlying tech was turned into
[https://simperium.com](https://simperium.com)

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EvanAnderson
Be careful with the demo! I noticed somebody creating "notes" w/ XSS (albeit
just an alert) while I was playing with it.

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simcop2387
Definitely. I just embedded autoplaying youtube videos: <iframe width="420"
height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3KANI2dpXLw?autoplay=1"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[http://magpie.sknkwrks.net/kjhkjh/hkjhkjhk](http://magpie.sknkwrks.net/kjhkjh/hkjhkjhk)

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hliyan
Seems "Magpie" is a common name for Git-related projects:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7378345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7378345)

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erikb
I'd love some screenshots in the docs.

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r0muald
I could not find a demo. It would help a lot if there was a working demo.

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charlesthomas
That's a really great idea. I'll have to work on setting that up.

edit: here is a demo:
[http://magpie.sknkwrks.net/](http://magpie.sknkwrks.net/)

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snicker
I was editing the note about "farts" trying to add a list of foods that cause
excessive flatulence (to test markdown support of lists, of course), but after
submitting my edit, I was getting 503 errors for a short period of time.

after a few more minutes, things seem fine

edit: it seems that someone was able to remove my hard work and valuable
information. Given that this is based on git, is there any way to revert or
view previous versions of notes?

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charlesthomas
This post is getting more traction than I anticipated, and Magpie was not
intended to have more than one user at a time.

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laurent123456
By the way, it looks there's a security issue - it's possible to search and
view all the notes without being logged in.

Edit: also it's listing all the files in the .git folder. I guess it should be
excluded from the searches.

