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.

  1. I want the website to allow categorization of notes into courses and units or deeper if necessary.
  2. The notes should support file formats like PDF, images, markdown, HTML or a combination of any of them.
  3. 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.

  • Toes♀
    1·
    2 days ago

    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

    https://www.atlassian.com/

    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

    • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 days ago

      +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.