Yesterday I was backing up my home directory to move everything over to a larger drive and a new install of Ubuntu, and for some reason I was curious which format my Tomboy notes were stored in. When I discovered that the ‘.note’ files in ~/.tomboy/ were XML files, I was excited about the idea of creating a web interface for Tomboy with PHP.
I searched the Tomboy mailing list and browsed around the wiki, and found that I wasn’t the first person to think of this (of course). I found a blog post about a mockup for Tomboy Online, but this was more of a hosted, social type of app and I was interested in making a standalone script. Also, it was only a concept, and no code exists for it. In the comments of this article there was a link to tomboy-web, but it was written in Java, so I couldn’t really play with it.
Eventually I came across the shell scripts and PHP of Erik Torsner, which I only needed to tweak slightly in order to use with the fantastic iUI library.
Rather than using shell scripts to sync up, I suggest following the steps outlined in Synchronize Tomboy Notes with Anything.
Download / Install
- Grab the zip file (demo)
- Unzip and upload to your web server BUT not before reading the security warning below.
- Put your .note files in the ‘note-storage’ directory, either by manually uploading notes every once in a while or (way cooler) following the instructions in this blog post.
Warning!
This is only a proof of concept, it’s a really bad idea to sync your confidential tomboy notes to your webserver. There are no security measures whatsoever. On the other hand, Wordpress has an optional ‘blog by email’ feature which relies on the obscurity of a secret email address… if you are going to risk it, place the files in a very obscure directory (named as an md5 hash or similar).
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One of my daily reads, Lifehacker, did a 
“Hello” to everyone and anyone who is reading this. I’m starting a blog pretty late into the game, kind of like a manager who suggests “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to have a guestbook on the site? So users can leave their name, a comment and their email address?” in 2005. Besides the obvious SEO benefits of having a blog where I regularly discuss North Bay Web Design (that was cheap), I think it will give me the opportunity to be a more active participant in the web design community. I’ve lurked and read tutorials on some awesome blogs, have benefited from CSS test suites painstakingly created by volunteers and examples/workarounds of bugs, etc. and I feel that I’ve greatly improved my skills since starting out, and now I will be able to contribute something to the community that helped me along.