ANNOTARE

A personal, digital notebook.

Why Annotare Exists

Hi, my name is Zach LeBar. And I am a nerd. Not simply a geek, but a full on, hardcore nerd. This file, it's written in a markup language designed by a guy named John Gruber. It's called Markdown, and I write just about everything in its syntax. I think that qualifies me as a nerd. This file was created through the command line, and edited using vim. I'm pretty sure that qualifies me as a nerd. I have an insatiable desire to be eagerly working on a "project" at all time. Go read this article by Michael Lopp. He explains this phenomenon extremely well.

All of those are contributing factors to Annotare's creation. Annotare exists because I need a project. It's goals and purpose are tied up in my intense nerdiness. Annotare, at its heart, is simply a digital notebook. The concept is nothing new. It's been around since digital things were first created. But I've never been satisfied with any of the iterations out there of this idea, a "digital notebook". Because I'm a nerd, I've chosen to build my own version of the digital notebook. And I'm calling it Annotare.

Try Annotare

A localStorage only version of Annotare is located at http://annotare.crgwbr.com/. There you can try out all the features of annotare without having to install or compile anything. Since it uses only localStorage as its only storage backend, you don't need to worry about your notes being read by anyone else.

Getting Started

Users and Security

Annotare is designed to be run locally, for a single user. Because of that, authentication, users, and permissions don't actually exist. If, however, you wanted to install Annotare on a server, HTTPBasicAuth would be an effective means of security.

Getting up and running

These instructions are written assuming you're running a sane operating system, such as Mac OS X or Linux, and that you're comfortable with a terminal. If you're running Windows and can't figure out how to make this work, please consider using OneNote instead.

Compiling form Source

Annotare is written in CoffeeScript and based on the Flakey.js framework by Craig Weber. The build system is based on CoffeeScript's included Cake build system. To compile from source, open a terminal in the root of this repo and run:

cd annotare
cake full_build

The Cakefile includes these tasks:

• build_js: Build the src/ directory into public/annotare.js
• build_css: Build css/ into public/annotare.css
• minify_js: Use Google's Closure compiler to minify public/annotare.js into public/annotare.min.js
• full_build: The same as running build_css, build_js, and minify_js
• watch: Watches src/ and css/ directories and re-compiles whenever a file changes.

Python Server

The Python server (tested with Python 2.7.2 on Mac OSX) is what serves the app to your browser and backs up your data. To make sure your system meets the required dependancies, from the project root directory, run:

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Next, start the local server by running:

cd annotare/server/
chmod 755 manage.py
./manage.py startserver

This will start up Bottle's built in dev server on localhost:8888. Head there in a web browser to start using Annotare.