Last week, I wrote about how I have started using hypothes.is for web annotation and how it was already seemingly improving my knowledge management workflow. As I continued to use it, I realized that just copying my annotations to my website via micropub wasn’t enough for me to truly integrate it into my workflow.

I’m big on learning in public and I keep a digital garden/wiki containing slightly more fully-formed stuff. However, I keep my private and personal notes as well as half-baked, hare-brained ideas in Joplin. I was thinking it would be very useful to have my hypothes.is annotations easily-accessible from within Joplin, but I struggled to find an off-the-shelf solution to making this happen.

So I decided to take matters into my own hands and build a Joplin plugin that allows users to pull their hypothes.is annotations into their local notes database. I’m excited to announce the alpha release of this plugin, which is already proving to be a valuable tool for me.

With this plugin, folks can automatically sync their annotations and tags into new notes in Joplin. This allows them to create a local copy of their annotation data and more easily integrate hypothes.is into their existing Joplin knowledge management workflow. Certainly, I’ve already noticed that having my annotations (or literature notes) in the same place as my permanent notes makes my personal workflow a little bit easier. Of course, it also means that you have a copy of your annotations should hypothes.is go down or if you’re working offline.

The plugin is open source and MIT-licensed. You are welcome (and encouraged) to contribute by providing feedback or even code to help improve it even further. It’s still in alpha and there are a couple of bugs, but it’s already proving to be a valuable tool for me and it might help you out too.