Show HN: Personal website inspired by Apple notes

[alanaan]

i stan apple notes, so i built a new personal website to look, feel, & work just like it. it's fast, fully interactive, & can be navigated entirely via keyboard shortcuts. it was a lot of fun to build. i wrote more about the implementation in the linked page.

check it out!

[Zanfa]

Looks nice, but scrolling is buggy on iOS Safari. There seems to be a nested scrollable area which doesn’t scroll properly when flinging up or down.

[alanaan]

thank you! fixed this :)

[pimlottc]

I tried to click on the gear icon, thinking it was settings menu. It's not very clear that it's an icon associated with the post.

[alanaan]

good call - any ideas how to make that more clear? there is a tooltip on desktop but not mobile

[pimlottc]

Why not move it to the left of the title, just like in the sidebar?

[alanaan]

https://www.alanagoyal.com/new-note-4eec2a7d-8b44-4e5c-a4ad-...

:)

[pimlottc]

How delightful!

[alanaan]

good idea - playing around with it now!

[ashryan]

This is really cool. I didn't expect to be able to make my own note.

I wondered what your top page would be, and it seems to redirect to /about-me. Did you try any other ideas for a top page? I guess that's an interesting problem since the Notes app doesn't have a top page.

[alanaan]

yeah it just redirects to the first note. i thought about having a welcome page but it took away from the apple notes feel. open to suggestions tho!

[moioci]

I see a flash of white text on a dark background, then "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)." in black on the same very dark background. Chrome on Win 10

[alanaan]

this is probably happening if you're viewing a note that has been deleted. since i had 10000+ notes created on the day it launched i set up a pg_cron batch to delete empty notes that are >30 min old.

if not, can you share the url you're seeing it on? thanks for letting me know!

[alanaan]

i added better error handling for this :)

https://www.alanagoyal.com/error

[kody]

Very cool. I appreciate the breakdown of how you built this.

[alanaan]

thanks! just added to it about some of the perf and security changes i made after launching :)

[financetechbro]

This is really cool. Thanks for sharing!

[ankrgyl]

Cool to see the balance between UX and security. I really like the UI!

[alanaan]

thanks! i wanted anyone to be able to create notes and be able to share them with others, so tried to come up with the most secure way to accomplish that :)

[eps]

On an older iPad it shows up as a blank page. Just FYI.

[alanaan]

oh no! looking into this. are you just on safari??

[eps]

Yep. iOS 14 though >_<

[gnicholas]

nit: the word "accessibility" is misspelled in your acknowledgments. Looks like a cool project!

[alanaan]

:face_palm: thank you!

[ckluis]

I love fun projects like this.

[alanaan]

<3

[goarchive]

Love the unique idea!

[ecjhdnc2025]

Now you just need a typeface with the distinctive alternate lower-case A :-)

[seasiden]

cool