Discourse as a Personal Notebook

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I have a personal Discourse instance which I use for multiple purposes, but for now I’ll stick to just the Notebook features, I’ll document some of the other features in the future though, in separate topics, and perhaps videos.

Notebook-friendly features you get ‘out of the box’ with Discourse…

  • tags, code formatting, emoji :face_with_raised_eyebrow: and custom emoji :yorkshire-rose:
  • All the standard Markdown formatting features like bold, italic, strikethrough, >quotes and more.
  • Links and Oneboxing
  • First-class image support, especially if you use the image grid for multiple images.
  • Excellent search throughout all your notes.
  • Markdown | tables |
  • Bulleted lists and 1. Numbered lists
  • Uploads of files
  • Video previews in-topic
  • Comprehensive Category/Group permissioning to allow sharing of notes.
  • Beautiful and functional DateTimes 2025-11-29T18:01:18Z

This makes it already pretty attractive compared to other platforms like Obsidian. I’m sure there will be tools out there with different or more features, but for me because I live in Discourse forums a lot of the time, it also makes sense to ‘dogfood’ Discourse for internal notes.

Discourse Setup

  • Category - Create a Category for your notebook. For general notes I have a category just called notebook, but I also have notebook categories for project-specific or subject-specific notes. I’d say start with just one category and add more when you have a lot of content with a particular Tag. If it’s a personal notebook, make yourself the only person who can see/reply/create topics, in the category’s Security settings.

  • Tags - Using Tags you can organise content and make your notes more discoverable or searchable. I have year tags like 2025 and subject tags like linux. This makes it easy to get a list of all your notes on that subject.

  • Email in to category - there is a Category setting (Custom incoming email address) to allow you to configure emailing in to category - this can take some setting up if self-hosting, as you need to Configure direct-delivery incoming email for self-hosted sites with Mail-Receiver - Self-Hosting - Discourse Meta, but it worth it - it’s very helpful to be able to email stuff direct from your email program to notebook@forum.example.com and it just turns up in the Notebook! (note that forwarding the emails sometimes results in the content being stripped by Discourse,small gotcha there)

  • Set Watching status (optional) - for archival purposes, I find it’s worth setting the notifications status of any notebook categories you create to Watching, this means you’ll get emails containing all notebook content, as a backup in case you ever deprecate your forum (of course, why would you?)

  • Customise the Left Sidebar - You can customise your left sidebar by adding the notebook category to your Category list, so it’s easy to get to. Additionally you can add any key Tags to the sidebar tag listing.

  • Sharing notes - if you want to be able to have some private notes and some shared, simply create another Category (like in my case developers) for these shared notes. Create Groups containing one or more co-collaborators, and add these groups to the Security settings of the category.

Plugins and Theme components

A number of theme components are useful for making your notebook even more featureful.

  • DiscoTOC TC - For nice structuring of notes that are longer and use Markdown headings, you can use this TC. If you always want a TOC in your #notebook entries (i do!), you can add the <div data-theme-toc="true"> </div> to the Topic Template in the Category Settings.

  • Discourse Kanban TC - depending on the kind of notes you’re managing, it can be helpful to be able to view your notes in a Kanban board form. Adding this TC allows you to view and organise the notes by their Tags.
    (It would be awesome if they could be ordered manually though, I am hoping this option will one day be added to the Kanban TC, at present they are ordered automatically with most recent activity at the top, like any topic list)

  • PDF Previews TC - with this plugin you can see an inline rendered preview of any PDFs you upload. This can be great for making a structured archive of emailed or scanned PDF documents.

  • Quote Callouts TC - (not an #official TC, but thanks Arkshine for making and supporting it!) - These add a lovely additional and colourful formatting tool to your notes.

    [!warning] They look like this!
    And they contain plain text like this.

  • Discourse Doc Categories Plugin - if your notes start to become something like a reference manual, wiki, or other ‘organisational memory device’ then you can use this TC to customise the left sidebar with an ‘index’ or menu of the key Topics.

  • Raw Post TC - this simple TC allows you to easily clip the entire Raw Markdown text from any post without having to first Edit it. It’s handy if you’re clipping ‘reusable copypasta’ text from a note into some other platform, into a website, or something like that.

Discourse AI

I’m only just starting to use Discourse AI on this Discourse, and I’m exploring ways to use the AI output. One thing’s for sure, by having all my AI conversations on the same instance I use for my notebook it makes it easy to preserve useful notes for later, simply by converting a bot PM into a Topic and moving it to notebook

Offline working

I guess one of the only drawbacks to using a Discourse instance, compared with Obsidian or local Markdown files is the fact all my notes are in the cloud.

I can partly mitigate this by having all notebook topics notified to me by email, as I then have a backup searchable version (might not be fully up to date, but it’s something) in my email. But really, it’s not that often I need to refer to a note when I’m offline now.