I’ve wanted to keep a journal–at least somewhat consistently–for a long time.

There’s a few things I want to log on a semi-regular basis: my coding, personal goals, reflections, quick notes about being the father to a 5.5 year old, etc.

I’ve tried different apps, sometimes a couple at a time, but none seemed so stick. Switching between apps seemed sub-optimal. Plus I didn’t like being locked in to that platform.

So of course I thought: why not do it in Notion?

I set up a Gallery with very basic customization. Set the Card preview to be the page cover and added a formula to concatenate the Created date and the Name as the title. No tags for now, I’ll add them later.

I chose the Gallery because I wanted it to be somewhat visual. But I realized that the Notion covers left a little to be desire. A set palette of solid colors and gradients. Some stock images. You could add other images but had to upload them from your machine or find them first.

So I decided to try something. I whipped up a simple web service using Flask that returns a 1500x300 cover. I started with solid backgrounds and then added a two-color gradient.

For a while this worked, but then I decided it would be nice to have some sort of illustration. After some quick Googling, I added emoji support.

I realize there’s still a lot more that I could add, but it works for now.

To use this, choose to provide a Link as your Notion cover, and then enter a URL in one of the following formats:

  • https://www.coversfornotion.com/solid/<color>
  • https://www.coversfornotion.com/gradient/<color1>/<color2>
  • https://www.coversfornotion.com/emoji/<emoji>/<color>
  • https://www.coversfornotion.com/emoji/<emoji>/<color1>/<color2>

For the above:

A bit more detailed instructions and examples are here.

That’s it. The code is here on repl.it if you want to fork and play with it, and also on Github.