Publishing this blog from Notion with elog

@misc{publishing-from-notion,
  author = {Mara Ellison Voss},
  title = {Publishing this blog from Notion with elog},
  howpublished = {Mara Ellison Voss},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://mouwumou.github.io/Offprint/blog/publishing-from-notion/}
}

Voss, M. E. (2025). Publishing this blog from Notion with elog. In Mara Ellison Voss.

Voss, Mara Ellison. “Publishing This Blog from Notion with Elog.” Mara Ellison Voss, 2025.

Voss, Mara Ellison. 2025. “Publishing This Blog from Notion with Elog.” In Mara Ellison Voss. Preprint.

I did not want a blog that was a folder of hand-written markdown, and I did not want a black-box CMS either. I wanted to write in Notion — where my reading notes and half-formed ideas already live — and have the published result land in a format I define, in a repo I own.

That is exactly the seam elog is built for.

The shape of the pipeline#

elog is a build-time tool. It reads documents from a writing platform (Notion, in my case), converts them to markdown, and writes them into a target directory. It does not run a server, and it does not impose a theme. The flow is:

Notion database  ──elog──▶  content/posts/*.md  ──build──▶  this site

The critical detail: elog emits a folder of markdown files with gray-matter front matter, and nothing else — no index, no manifest. Discovery is left to the consumer. That is not a limitation; it is the contract. It means my site decides what a post is.

The front-matter contract#

Every Notion database column becomes a front-matter key. I expose exactly the fields this site knows how to render:

---
title: The geometry of uncertainty in population codes
urlname: geometry-of-uncertainty
date: 2025-06-14
updated: 2025-07-02
description: Why uncertainty lives on curved manifolds.
categories: Research notes
tags:
  - neuroscience
  - geometry
top: true
---

title, urlname, date, and updated are always written by elog. The rest are optional Notion columns. My loader reads the folder, parses the front matter, and builds the index at compile time — so a new post is just a new file.

The elog config#

The whole thing is one config file. The write block points at Notion; the deploy block points at this repo's content directory:

module.exports = {
  write: {
    platform: "notion",
    notion: {
      token: process.env.NOTION_TOKEN,
      databaseId: process.env.NOTION_DB,
      filter: { property: "status", select: { equals: "Published" } },
    },
  },
  deploy: {
    platform: "local",
    local: {
      outputDir: "./content/posts",
      filename: "urlname",
      format: "matter-markdown",
    },
  },
  image: { enable: true, platform: "github" },
}

filename: "urlname" is what keeps my URLs stable and human — the file is named after the slug, not the title, so renaming a post in Notion never breaks a link.

The last mile: CI#

A GitHub Action runs elog sync on a schedule (and on demand via a Notion webhook), commits any changed markdown, and lets the normal deploy take over. Writing a post is now indistinguishable from editing a Notion page — and yet the published artifact is plain markdown I can grep, diff, and migrate forever.

That combination — frictionless input, fully-owned output — is the whole reason this site exists.