Is there an easy and free way for me to host a website specifically for displaying college notes? Some of my peers have created a repository of notes and content and stored them in a shareable Google Drive folder. I, however, wish to share my notes in a format more practical than just a cloud storage directory, similar to those of code library documentation sites.
My requirements are as follows.
- I want the website to allow categorization of notes into courses and units or deeper if necessary.
- The notes should support file formats like PDF, images, markdown, HTML or a combination of any of them.
- I should be able to add and edit the notes from any device at any time.
Is there any pre-made software for this purpose or do I have to create a website and a workflow myself? I am fine with either of them as long as the above requirements are met in a convenient manner.
Consider using github. You could have as many repos/branches per topic/year/whatever and you did not list any need for privacy so the repositories could be public and read only for everyone but you.
There also a built in code editor(IDE)
You can also push binary files
Nextcloud might handle what you want. There are a zillion places that offer hosting for it, or you can self-host it. MediaWiki is another possible choice, that despite the name is more document oriented and less media oriented than NextCloud is. Again, you can self-host, or there are commercial hosts for it. Lots of VPS providers also offer one-click installers for it. I haven’t run a MediaWiki instance myself, but am familiar with it as a user through editing Wikipedia. I’ve run Gitit, which has a similar UI, but is backed by a Git repo.
You want to self host? Good :-)
All a bit different. All have their benefits. Just have a look.
Check the self-hosted communities, this is a regular discussion there. I use OneNote and would like to get away from it, but every solution is a mixed bag.
A couple options off the top of my head:
Silver Bullet A note-taking app that supports linking. You’d need to host it on a VPS (that’s the simplest approach for your use case, I’d think, with any shared app).
OneNote As students, you probably get Office 365 for a major discount, and honestly OneNote is hard to beat. It syncs to each machine, so everyone has a full copy of a given notebook at any time. Sync is robust, and very slick, with things like showing Author, updates, etc. I do recommend the full OneNote desktop app and not the Windows App nonsense, because the desktop app doesn’t require OneDrive to sync between computers, (though it can use a OneDrive location). To share a notebook on a LAN, you just share the folder it’s in and other machines will sync through the share (I’d create a user just for the notebook/share).
One benefit of a notebook being on OneDrive is the ability to sync to mobile devices (Android and iOS have OneNote apps), and sync doesn’t depend on other devices being online.
To make things easier, you could setup two accounts on OneDrive: a primary account that you manage with the initial notebook(s), and a “user” account that you share your notebook with and then give everyone the credentials for. This will make it easier for others to use, since they won’t have to setup a OneDrive account. You’ll only need to provide a 2FA key for them on initial login - the app will retain the credentials.
I have a love/hate relationship with OneNote. I’ve used it for 15 years now, I’d find it hard to supplant, but I really dislike being tied to a proprietary format, and especially requiring OneDrive for mobile device sync.
A low-brow solution would be an existing cloud product such as Dropbox et.al, with subdirectories for each course. Alternatively, a self-hosted equivalent.
Depending on your comfort level and cash flow.
You could host a mediawiki server on something like ovh or digital ocean.
Alternatively Atlassian has a software suite that matches your needs I figure.
https://mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
There’s also Microsoft OneNote that’s fairly popular. I believe you can use it through their cloud services. And depending on your education institution’s policy it might be free if you ask their IT department.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onenote/digital-note-taking-app
+1 for mediawiki
Although you really need to consider the peer group you are working with, and make the contribution as little work as possible. In my experience, as soon as the course is over people won’t want to do any extra work like change the formatting or integrating with existing materials. And requiring to use a specific format (even if it’s something dead simple as markdown) might already be too much friction.
In my experience shared cloud storage (GDrive, Dropbox,…) works quite well, even if the feature set is very limited. Being able to simply plonk your .docx/.pdf/.whatever into there is very easy and low friction.
A different solution I saw that worked was a forum where you could also upload files that could be categorized into the different courses and were then accessible by others. If you were to self-host this, you’d really want to make sure somehow that it’s not exploited to spread malware or worse.
Anyways, I wouldn’t think too much about how well the material can be represented, but rather how you can get your peers to continuously contribute to it. The best representation is useless without the data going with it.
