Neopolitan

Introduction

Neopolitan is a way to take notes. It's easy to learn, quick to customize, and super powerful.

Note Blocks

Neopolitan notes are made of blocks. Each starts with two dashes and a name.

-- title

-- title

-- Book-Review

-- 101_Song_I_Recommend

The only rule is that names can't have spaces or a few other specific characters in them¹.

Block Content

Content goes below the starting line.

-- title

This Is The Headline Title

More lines down here become 
paragraphs for the body of
the block. 

Extra Info

Blocks can have extra information. Each piece gets its own line that starts with two dashes.

-- book-review
-- title: On Writing
-- author: Stephen King 

A fantastic read. Biggest take
away: It all comes down to 
putting in the effort. 

Get up. Do your thing.

What Do They Do?

Neopolitan notes are easy to make. They don't do much on their own, though.

Using them in apps is where things get interesting.

Enter Neopoligen

Neopoligen² (with a gen) is the first app that uses Neopolitan (with a tan). It's a website builder. Point it at some notes and it'll turn them into a website.

The conversion works by applying templates to blocks. For example, the default template for the book-review block from figure 1 produces this:

Adjustable Layouts

The templates are yours to change. The same content from figure 1 looks like this after a few tweaks:

Collect All The Things

Apps can use blocks to make collections. For example, Neopoligen can gather book-review blocks from all your notes and display them on a single page.

Using All The Info

Apps can create collections from the extra block info too. For example, using the author info from book-review blocks to show everything you've read from one person:

Formatting

Content can be formatted in multiple ways.

Surrounding text with pairs of asterisks **makes it bold**

Using pairs of underscores __makes it italics__

The other options are listed in the Shorthand Spans section of the Details page.

Footnotes

Wrapping text in pairs of ^^ characters makes it a reference to a footnote. Apps can use the references to automatically generate footnote links.

For example, this ^^3^^ turns into this³ which links to the corresponding footnote at the bottom of the page.

The block that makes up the footnote looks like this:

-- footnote
-- id: 3

This is an example footnote

(Footnotes can also link back. I just haven't added that to the template yet.)

Wiki Links

Wrapping text in pairs of @@ tells apps to treat it as a wikipedia style link to other content.

Adding the connecting terms is done by adding a -- wiki piece of extra info to a block.

For example, this:

@@Example@@

Would link to a note with this block:

-- title
-- wiki: Example

This Is An Example Note

More Details

That's it for the fundamentals. And, really, that's just about it for the entire format. The other two things are Wrapper Blocks and Custom Tags. You can learn about them on the details page.

Current Status

Neopolitan is a way to format notes. You can make them in any app you want.

It's up to individual apps to do something beyond displaying a note's text. Neopoligen is the first app that brings them to life. I've been using prototypes for a few years to run my site. I couldn't be happier with it.

The current version of Neopoligen is the final prototype. Some parts of it are hard-wired for my site. I'm in the process of removing those bits to make it generally available. I don't have an ETA, but you can follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or my my RSS feed for updates.

It won't be long. I'm really looking forward to sharing it with you.

-a

Footnotes

1. See the details page for more info
2. Neopoligen - the web site builder that uses Neopolitan notes. I'm re-tooling it right now. The new version will be available soon. I'll post updates Mastodon, Bluesky, and my my RSS feed.
3. This is an example footnote