Considering that self-hosting was not possible¹, I started looking into building a system for myself from "scratch". I got used to the org markup language and found myself using it in Simplenote, even if Simplenote didn't support it back then. So I figured to look into solution that will let me use org markup. Starting with mobile solutions (since I've got Emacs on my laptop², anyway. You can't beat that for org markup) I found Orgzly. I then needed some way to sync my notes between my phone and any other devices I use, namely, my laptop. I found, after reading through the Orgzly docs on the topic, it has support for this nifty thing called WebDAV, which it additionally mentioned that Nextcloud had support for it. Having heard great things about NextCloud, I decided on that. For actually accessing the Nextcloud instance on my home-server from my laptop and phone, I use Tailscale. It is a WireGaurd-based VPN that is dead easy to get up and going, and I've used it extensively for accessing systems without having to deal with port-forwarding. Alright, now onto the setup!

My "home-server" is an Itona TC6727 thin-client running a minimal installation of Debian 12. I use docker to manage other services, mainly Kavita and OpenProject. Reading through the README for docker image for Nextcloud, I settled on using the following docker-compose.yml:

version: '2'

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:

services:
  db:
    image: mariadb:10.6
    restart: always
    command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --log-bin=binlog --binlog-format=ROW
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=mystrongrootpw
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=mystrongsqlpw
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud

  app:
    image: nextcloud
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8081:80
    links:
      - db
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
    environment:
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=mystrongsqlpw
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_HOST=db

Using a docker-compose up -d, I had Nextcloud running on port 8081 on my server. After setting up an admin account, I proceeded to setting up the clients:

I run Android, so I installed Orgzly using the F-Droid client. I then went over to my new Nextcloud instance and created a folder called "Nextnote" to store all the incoming notes. Referencing this setup from itcamefromtheinternet, I found the WebDAV sharing link for my Nextcloud instance under Files Settings > WebDAV. In Orgzly, under Settings > Sync > Repositories I pasted the url provided by NextCloud and added /Nextnote / to the end of the url. After logging in, I was good to go. Under Settings > Sync > Auto-Sync I enabled all that I could enable. Now, I moved onto my laptop:

After reading through Aceessing Nextcloud files using WebDAV page on the Nextcloud docs, I decided to just try the official desktop client after unsuccessfully trying out the command-line method³. It was available from the Fedora repos so an install later I had it running with a nice indicator in my panel. After logging in with the GUI, I configured the sync folders. I added a hello-world.org file and after manually syncing, it showed up under Orgzly! I did a little "hello" message for kicks, and proceeded for the main event: getting all my notes from Simplenote into Nextnote.

From the Simplenote web-app, I was able to export them all as text files compressed in zip format. After thinking for a bit, I decided to just change the extension from .txt to .org and figured that would work well enough. I used this script in order to do that, run in the extracted directory:

#!/bin/env bash

find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.txt" -exec basename {} \; | while read filename;
do
echo "Processing ${filename}"
cp "${filename}" "/home/ruusaig/Nextcloud/Nextnote/${filename%.*}.org"
done

After syncing, everything started showing up under Orgzly. But wait! Some of my notes, I used stars to indicate bullet points. As anyone who uses org Markdown knows, stars are headings. And Orgzly treats each of those as a "note" and the file they are in as a "notebook". This caused some "notebooks" to be very hard to read. Since there weren't many files like this, I manually replaced the stars with bullet-points using the Emacs replace functions. Some of my older notes from Simplenote had carriage-return characters everywhere, these ^M things. I just replaced them with spaces: everything still looked fine afterwards.

I used to keep track of things in Simplenote by using headings of the form of dd/mm/yy: with content underneath. In Orgzly, this didn't show up as headings, as they weren't actually headings. I wanted headings! So using regexp-replace, I made them into headings with [0-9]*/[0-9]*/[0-9]*: → * \&. The "\&" is what was matched, and can be used in the replacement text. I found that pretty neat. Emacs ftw.

After using this setup for a few weeks, I found myself very happy with it! Setup was fast, easy and simple, and sync works great! Of course, if you are just looking for a note-taking solution, Orgzly is a great choice on mobile. But if you want cross-platform sync, I recommend you have a look at what I've here, and try it out or something similar! You could substitute Nextcloud with something like Dropbox or even try just using a Syncthing, thing. If you don't have a thin-client handy, you could just host your notes out of your laptop or desktop computer under a VPN, so only selected devices can connect and access them. But if you can spare the money, try setting up a nice home server for yourself and family. Thinclients and NUCs are pretty cheap, a Raspberry Pi has also proven to be great for this sort of thing, and more. I highly suggest you to choose open, privacy and user-friendly solutions for your data whenever you can. Self-host and embrace the power! Until we meet again.