Notion as a Blog?

After much procrastination, I finally made the decision to embrace Notion as a main tool for building my corner on the web. The frontend is created using the cool project nextjs-notion-starter-kit made by Travis Fischer.

However, I don’t think that Notion is a perfect tool, but it solved the digital writing issues in a very neat way. Here are my impressions on Notion:

The Good: Getting Things Done

I have a lot going on in my life trying to balance between work, study, and personal life. With the plenty of blogging tools, I don’t think I should pay a lot of efforts to start blogging. At the same time, I want a super flexible tool for doing so, with a minimal set of restrictions. That's where Notion comes to the rescue! It simplifies the process by providing ready-made templates and an intuitive editor. Also, organizing the page content as blocks and the possibility of nesting unlimited pages is just superb.

Put crudely, Notion can be classified as a toy CMS at some degree: it offers a great WYSIWYG markdown editor, flexible databases, and API. What else do you need for a blog?!

The Bad: Data Ownership

When you choose a platform like Notion, you have to make some sacrifices, and one of them is data ownership. Your precious content, organized in Notion's neat pages, is stored in their cloud and data centers. Sure, you can export your data whenever you want, either individually or as a full backup. But let's be real, you won't have the same control as someone who uses a markdown-based blog built from scratch.

Additionally, Notion is a closed-source and proprietary software. It's packed with impressive features and flexibility, no doubt, but at the end of the day, it's still a product controlled by a profit-driven company. This might not bother everyone, but it's worth considering that your beloved Notion is ultimately under the control of a single entity.

The Ugly: Arabic Support Limitations

Now, this particular aspect is of significant importance to me. Notion's support for the Arabic language is still a work in progress. Notion's team hasn't given full priority to Arabic support in their software, and it can be quite annoying. That said, you can still write Arabic text in Notion and make it work by using external tools like Dawin.io editor, but that requires a lot of ctrl+c, ctrl+v!

For that, I chose Notion currently for the English blog. I will try to find a solution in the future for the Arabic version.