Hi , I’m Aravind Balla and you are reading letter #10 from the Hackletter where I talk about the learnings and give you behind the scenes of things I keep doing for fun.

Is Notion’s new API ready yet?

TL;DR Mostly yes, but not complete.

I got some time to try out the Notion API. There are a few things I like and some work still pending. Well, it says it is in Beta, so we can expect few things undone.

You don’t need a paid plan.

They’ve give access to the API for free accounts as well. That’s really cool, and everyone gets to try it out. They will be putting limits to the API usage though. Pro plans get more access and will have higher limits.

What is it ready for?

Writing to database (like tables) and pages works well. And that actually opens up a lot of possibilities. Zapier and n8n have already started supporting the Notion API.

I could quickly hack together a small script which saves the number of visits for each page to a table in Notion last weekend.

Some thing like this

Tweet with demo video - https://twitter.com/aravindballa/status/1393108375777386501

I wanted to extend that to make a full fledge analytics tool powered by Notion. I thought I was unsuccessful, but an idea struck after I tweeted about this. Link to complete thread

It’s funny how you get ideas when you explain why something might not work.

Major missing part

We cannot get the content of all the blocks yet. Text is completely supported, like headings, bulleted lists, etc. But the images aren’t. And I guess other complex blocks don’t as well.

So retrieving the complete content of a page is difficult.

But thanks to open source, we an alternative to fetching all the blocks which has been working from long, even before the release of this API - notion-client.

Let me know if you have any plan’s with the Notion API. I’d love to talk about it.

That’s all for this Tuesday.

See you in a week. 👋