Meet Lotion: Your Notion Buddy

Hey there, we’d like to share Lotion, a little gem we whipped up to help untangle the sometimes messy business of shuffling data between Notion and… well, everywhere else we need it. Lotion is a nifty JavaScript-based CLI tool that effortlessly scoops up data from a Notion database, tidies it up, and readies it for deployment.

Why We Created Lotion

We’re pretty big fans of Notion around here; it’s ideal for team collaboration, serving as the central hub for gathering, organizing, and refining content for almost every interactive we develop. From trivia games and maps to timelines and our ‘Birding By Ear’ experience, Notion is a collaborative space where the whole team can pitch in, provide feedback, and make content adjustments. This setup ensures we’re no longer juggling multiple versions of documents—Notion is our definitive source of truth. However, exporting this content into usable formats wasn’t as streamlined as it could have been. That’s where Lotion steps in. It simplifies the transition from Notion to deployment, making the export process easier and significantly reducing the chance of mistakes.

What Lotion Actually Does

Data Transformation: Lotion fetches data from Notion and transforms it into the exact shape our applications need.

Filtering and Validation: It makes sure the data is clean and dressed up, ready for showtime, based on some smart rules we set.

Local Storage: Lotion neatly packs up our spruced-up data into JavaScript objects (.js), type-defined files (.ts), or structured JSON files (.json), making everything play nice together. It can even handle downloading and organizing files from Notion’s File & Media columns.

Reproducible Configuration: All the settings live in a simple config file that you can pop into version control without a second thought.

Over the past year, Lotion has saved us countless hours of grunt work, freeing us up to focus on the fun, creative stuff instead of drowning in data drudgery.

Lotion is still a work-in-progress, but it’s sturdy enough that we’re confident it’ll be a game-changer for you too.

Check it out on GitHub and let us know what you think!