Using Neopolitan Notes as a Database
The Starter's Block
The building blocks of Neopolitanneopolitan notes are, well, blocks. They begin with two dashes followed by a name.
-- title
This is a Title BlockPicking names for blocks is up to youneopoligen. -- title is simple and straight forward. You could just as easily do:
-- some-esoteric-thing
Detials about the exoteric
thing.Blocks can also have "attributes". Extra information about the block. They're made by adding more lines starting with two dashes.
-- book-review
-- title: On Writing
-- author: Stephen King
-- image: on-writing-cover
-- image-alt: The cover of On Writing
It all comes down to putting in
the effort. Get up. Do your thing.The attriubtes can then be used as part of the web page:
It all comes down to putting in the effort. Get up. Do your thing.
Like the names of blocks, you can name your attributes whatever you want. That free-form naming opens up a lot of interesting opportunities.
Enter Neopoligen
Neopolitan (with a tan) is a way to take notes. It doesn't do anything by itself. It's up to apps to use the notes to do interesting things. That's where Neopoligen (with a gen) comes in. It's turns Neopolitan notes into websites.
Like most site builders, Neopoligen makes individual pages It also makes standard "index" pages with lists of notes on them. With Neopolitan's blocks, Neopoligen can do a lot more. It can make collections of content in just about any way you can imagine.
These Blocks In Particular
Basic web pages comes directly from individual notes. A top down conversion of the contents of the note into the contents of the webpage.
Webpage can also be built from collections of blocks from other notes. Take a set of monthly media diet notes as an example. The first two being:
-- title
January Reading
It was cold. Perfect time
to snuggle up with some
books. No movies though.
-- book-reivew
-- title: A Scanner Darkly
-- author: Philip K Dick
Better than the movie even
though the grapics in the
film were slick.
-- book-review
-- title: Catch-22
-- author: Joseph Heller
It was a slog for a while,
but totaly worth the
pay off at the end.-- title
February Media
Some big screen on the
home screen and some
fear of the future.
-- movie-reivew
-- title: Speed Racer
Catches a lot of flack,
but you can't deny those
visuals
-- book-review
-- title: Handmaid's Tale
-- author: Margaret Atwood
This type of fiction
is meant as a warning.
Not a road map.with those followed by the rest of the months. Each note gets its own website page. A one-to-one relationship.
Then, lets say you wanted to have a single page that listed all the books you've read. You can do that by making a collection block in a Neopolitan note like thisthe specific details are still a wip:
-- title
All My Books
This is it. This
is all of them.
-- collection
[! FOR_EACH review IN book-reviews !]
[@ review.title @]
by [@ review.author @]
[! DONE !]Which would turn into this on its web page:
This is it. This is all of them.
- A Scanner Darkly
by: Philip K Dick - Catch-22
by: Joseph Heller - Joseph Heller
by: Margaret Atwood
More Choices To Choose From
Neopoligen looks for -- metadata blocks in notes.
-- title
A Note with Metadata
-- book-review
-- title: Nineteen Eighty-Four
-- by: George Orwell
Again. A warning, not a
road map.
-- metadata
-- created: May 23, 2025These sections don't show up on the webpages. They're used to store information about a note. Information that can be used to build a collection.
For example, instead of a page with your complete book list, you could make a page with all the books you read over the years during summer vacations.
Getting Specific
There's nothing stopping you from adding extra info to individual blocks either. Take ratings for books:
-- book-review
-- title: Diamond Age
-- author: Neal Stephenson
-- rating: 5/5That gives you the power to create a page with all your top rated books. Or, lowest rates.
You can get even more complex. Like, a page with all the 5 out of 5 books you read each May for the last seven years.
In Which My Mind Is Blown
My original goal for Neopolitan was to be able to use simple notes to make fully featured web pages. Each block showing up on a page with an appropriate layout.
The idea of making collections from blocks in different files didn't occur to me until I'd been making notes for some time. Now that it has, I'm even more excited about them.
I can't wait to finish the apps so I can offer them to you.
-a
Things to note
- there is no database here. it's all just your files.
- Date will be in the RFC format. It's generally the responsibility of apps to update them when necessary.
Footnotes
Neopolitan notes