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Notion API

The Public Beta of the Notion API dropped! Woot! Here’s their guide. I’ve been a Notion user and fan for a long time, for both personal and professional team use. They even sponsored a few videos around here a while back that are still a great representation of how I use Notion. Because Notion is so workflow-oriented, it’s a perfect app to have API integrations with, making this release feel like it was a long time coming.

This is a full-blown API, so you can do things you’d expect to be able to do, like cURL for users, the content of pages, and manipulate databases. They have detailed documentation, expected barriers like rate limits, and even a JavaScript SDK.

This changes the game on some existing services. For example, Super was always a pretty neat way to make a Notion-powered website, but it felt a little risky to me. What if Notion didn’t like that usage and cut it off somehow? Or released their own similar tool? Meh, not risky anymore. Apps like Super can rest easy knowing there is a real API for this so they don’t have to do whatever workaround they were doing before (scraping?) and this kind of usage is likely encouraged, if anything.

I also think it was super smart of Notion to include pre-built integrations with other services people are definitely going to want. For example, you can connect a form on TypeForm to a Notion database so that new entries are automatically placed there. Even better, they have Zapier and Automate integrations, so you can wire up just about any app-to-app integration to you can think of.

I was ready to get using this API right away. On ShopTalk Show we have an ask question form and we sent those submissions to Trello as a way to put them somewhere where we could reference and organize them. But we don’t really use Trello much these days; but we’ve used Notion for planning for ages. I’ve long wanted a way to pipe questions from that form right into Notion. I was all ready to write a little code to do it, but I didn’t have to thanks to the Zapier integration.

Here’s how I got that working. The ShopTalk form exists in Wufoo:

Which we embed on our WordPress site:

I set up a Zapier trigger to fire when that form is submitted:

To make sure it can go somewhere in Notion, I had to create a new Integration on the Notion side:

This next part is very important! You have to explicitly share the database with the integration, as if the integration was a user.

Once you’ve done that, you can see the Notion database on the Zapier side, and map the Wufoo form fields to the Notion database fields.

Now when the form is filled out, we get the new questions immediately over in Notion, which is where we do our show planning anyway! No more copy and pasting crap from other places!

I was very happy to get this all done literally on day one of having this API in public beta. Great job Notion!

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Notion-Powered Websites

I’m a big fan of Notion, as you likely know from previous coverage and recent video. It’s always interesting to see what other people do with Notion, and even how Notion uses Notion.

I’d say most usage of Notion is private and internal, but any page on Notion can be totally public with the flip of a switch. We do that with some stuff like our post ideas page and here’s a simple camping checklist I made for myself.

That’s pretty rad. You could use that for lots of business-things you might otherwise literally build a website to do. Maybe a public product roadmap, a job posting, a press release an announcement…

But it’s not quite a website. You don’t get a custom domain name. You don’t have any analytics on it. You’re limited by the exact feature set of Notion.

People have been trying to extract the data out of Notion and essentially use it as a CMS for a while now…

But all those ways are, ya know, a decent amount of effort.

Stephen Ou recently showed me a pretty cool idea he has called Fruition. It’s entirely free, and also a bit of effort to set up, but once you’re done, you have your own domain name that hosts a Notion page and gives you some control over it (like putting in fonts and scripts and such).

It’s very clever in that it uses Cloudflare Workers to do all the heavy lifting.

This is probably the easiest-to-manage website ever. Just open Notion, change stuff, done.

Stephen admits Fruition is somewhat complex to set up. If you’re looking for something easier and perhaps more flexible, check out Super.

Actual neumorphism in the wild!

I would note that none of these things are official Notion products or affiliates of it in any way. Honestly, they all make me a little nervous in that they could break if Notion ever decides they don’t care for the product to be used this way. I also feel like Notion has been saying an API is something they’d like to offer for a while. That will be the real answer to all this and there will be a proliferation of third-party products once we have it.

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How I’ve Been Using Notion Personally and Professionally

I use Notion quite a bit, both personally and professionally.

In a sense, it's just an app for keeping documents in one place: little notes, to-do lists, basic spreadsheets, etc. I like the native macOS Notes app just fine. It's quick and easy, it's desktop and mobile, it syncs... but there are enough limitations that I wanted something better. Plus, I wanted something team-based and web-friendly (shared URLs!) and Notion hits those nails on the head.

Here's a bunch of ways to use Notion as well as some scattered random notes and ideas about it.

Workspaces are your teams

The word "workspace" almost makes it seem like you could or should use them as your top-level organization structure within a team. Like different projects would use different workspaces. But I'd say: don't do that. Workspaces are teams, even if it's a party of you and only you.

Pricing is billed by workspace. Team members are organized by workspace. Search is scoped by workspace. Switching workspaces isn't too difficult, but it's not lightning fast, either. I'd say it's worth honoring those walls and keeping workspaces to a minimum. It's almost like Slack. It's easy to get Too-Many-Slack'd, so best to avoid getting Too-Many-Notion'd.

Meeting notes

We have a weekly all-hands meeting at CodePen where we lay out what we've done and what we're going to do. It's nice to have that as a document so it can include links, notes, comments, embeds, etc.

Those notes don't disappear next week — we archive them as a historical record of everything we do.

Publishing and advertising schedules

I like looking at a spreadsheet-like document to see upcoming CSS-
Tricks articles with their statuses:

But that same exact document can be viewed as a calendar as well, if that's easier to look at:

There can be all sorts of views for the same table of content, which is a terrific feature:

Knowledge bases

This might be the easiest selling point for Notion. I'm sure a lot of companies have a whole bunch of documents that get into how the company works, including employee databases, coding guidelines, deployment procedures, dashboards to other software, etc. Sometimes that works as a wiki, but I've never seen a lovely setup for this kind of thing. Notion works fantastically as a collaborative knowledge base.

Public documents

I can make a document public, and even open it to public comments with the flip of a switch.

Another super fun thing in Notion is applying a header image and emoji, which gives each document a lot of personality. It's done in a way that can't really be screwed up and made into a gross-looking document. Here's an example where I've customized the page header — and look at the public URL!

I've also used that for job postings:

It's also great for things like public accessibility audits where people can be sent to a public page to see what kinds of things are being worked on with the ability to comment on items.

Quick, collaborative documents

Any document can be shared. I can create a quick document and share it with a particular person easily. That could be a private document shared only with team members, or with someone totally outside the team. Or I can make the document publicly visible to all.

I use Notion to create pages to present possibilities with potential sponsorship partners, then morph that into a document to keep track of everything we're doing together.

We use a show calendar for ShopTalk episodes. Each show added to the calendar automatically creates a page that we use as collaborative show notes with our guests.

It's worth noting that a Notion account is required to edit a document. So anyone that's invited will have to register and be logged in. Plus, you'll need to share it with the correct email address so that person can associate their account with that address.

Blog post drafts

I've been trying to keep all my blog post drafts in Notion. That way, they can easily be shared individually and I can browse all the collected ideas at once.

Exporting posts come out as Markdown too, and that's great for blog post drafts because it translates nicely:

Private sub-team documents

Being able to share documents with specific people is great. For example, we have a Founder's Meetings section on CodePen:

There are probably a million more things

Notion is simply documents with interesting blocks. Simple, but brilliant. For me, it can replace and consolidate things like Trello and other kanban tools, lightweight project management platforms, GitHub issues (if you don't need the public-ness), wikis, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and even simple one-off public websites.

Here's a website dedicated to other people's interesting Notion pages.

What I want from Notion

I'd love to see Notion's web app links open in their desktop app instead of the web. I prefer the app because I have plenty of browser tabs open as it is. It's gotta be possible to do this with a browser extension. There used to be "Paws" for Trello and there was a browser extension that would open Trello links in that app, so there is prior precedent out there.

I'd also like Notion to explore a tabs feature. I constantly need more than one document open at a time and right now the only way to do that is with multiple windows. There is some back-and-forth arrow action that's possible, but it would be interesting to see native tabs or native window splitting somehow.

I'd love to see some performance upgrades too. It's not terribly bad, but working in Notion is so ubiquitous and important in my day-to-day that I'd love for it to feel more instantaneous than it currently does.

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