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Integrating Jottings with Your Dev Workflow

• 6 min read • Use Cases

I built Jottings with a specific vision: a place to capture thoughts without friction. But as I started using it myself, I realized something interesting—the simplicity and reliability of Jottings made it perfect for integration into development workflows. Not as some heavy-handed project management tool, but as a lightweight, always-on channel for sharing updates, announcements, and status information.

Today, I want to share how developers can use Jottings as an integration point in their existing tooling ecosystem.

The Developer's Problem

Most developers work within complex systems. We have:

  • GitHub repositories with commit histories and deployments
  • Slack channels for team communication
  • CI/CD pipelines that run automatically
  • Monitoring dashboards tracking everything from uptime to performance
  • Personal knowledge systems scattered across notes, wikis, and documentation

The problem? All of this information stays siloed. It's hard to maintain a single source of truth for what's actually happening in your projects, especially when you want to share it publicly or make it accessible outside your primary tools.

This is where Jottings fits differently.

Jottings as an Integration Hub

Instead of thinking of Jottings as another tool to add to your stack, think of it as a publishing endpoint. A place where your tools can send important information, and where humans (and other systems) can consume it in standard, predictable formats.

Here's why this matters:

Feeds are first-class citizens. Every Jottings site comes with both RSS and JSON Feed support. These aren't afterthoughts—they're native to the platform. Your automation can publish to Jottings, and other systems (or people) can subscribe to those feeds.

The API is minimal but thoughtful. We've deliberately kept the Jottings API lean. It's not trying to be everything. But what it does, it does well: create updates, manage your site, track metadata. This makes it easy to integrate without learning a complex API.

It's designed for public sharing. Unlike your internal Slack or GitHub, Jottings is built for the web. Updates you push to Jottings are immediately searchable, shareable, and indexable. They have URLs. They have Open Graph previews. They're real web citizens.

Practical Integration Ideas

Let me walk through some concrete examples of how I see developers using Jottings in their workflows:

Deployment Announcements

Imagine a GitHub Actions workflow that triggers whenever you deploy to production:

- name: Post deployment notification
  run: |
    curl -X POST https://api.jottings.me/api/v1/jots \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.JOTTINGS_API_TOKEN }}" \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -d '{
        "siteId": "${{ secrets.JOTTINGS_SITE_ID }}",
        "content": "Deployed version 2.1.0 to production. New features: improved search performance, dark mode support.",
        "tags": ["deployments", "v2.1.0"]
      }'

Now your deployment history is public, timestamped, and accessible via RSS. Your users can subscribe to know when updates ship. You have a permanent record. It's discoverable through search.

Build Status and CI/CD Insights

Beyond just "deployed successfully," you could post interesting build metrics:

  • Build time improvements ("Build time down to 2.3s with new caching strategy")
  • Test coverage updates ("Reached 87% test coverage after adding E2E tests")
  • Performance metrics ("Page load time improved 40% after optimizing images")

These become a narrative of your project's health and progress. And they're available as structured data through the JSON Feed endpoint for programmatic access.

Status Pages and Incident Updates

Instead of maintaining a separate status page, you could use Jottings as your truth source:

  • Post incidents as they happen
  • Add updates with tags like incident or resolved
  • Subscribers get real-time updates through RSS
  • Historical record is permanent and searchable

Changelog Publishing

Every Jottings site can have a changelog. Post updates as you make them. Tag them appropriately. Use markdown for formatting. Your users have a feed, your site has a permanent record, and you don't need to maintain separate changelog infrastructure.

Development Decisions and Learning

This is more personal, but I use Jottings to document interesting technical decisions or learning moments. Not full blog posts (those live in my main blog), but quick insights:

  • "Discovered that DynamoDB transactions solve our counter race conditions—shipping this tomorrow"
  • "Why we chose Cloudflare Workers over Lambda@Edge: cost and simplicity"
  • "TIL: R2 presigned URLs support custom headers for security"

These become a public record of your technical journey. Engineers considering your stack can see how you think about problems.

Why This Matters for Developers

Traditional development tools are either:

  1. Inward-facing: Slack, GitHub, CI/CD dashboards. Great for team coordination, but your information doesn't leave the silo.
  2. Outward-facing but heavyweight: Traditional blogs, status pages, documentation sites. Great for public communication, but high friction to maintain.

Jottings is designed to be both. It's lightweight enough to integrate into automated workflows. But it's also a real web presence—your updates are URLs, they're shareable, they're part of the web graph.

For developers, this means:

  • Less duplication: Post once to Jottings, subscribers get the update through RSS, search engines index it, it's part of your site. No copy-pasting across platforms.
  • Programmatic access: The JSON Feed format means your tools can consume Jottings data. Imagine a dashboard that aggregates deployment history, incident reports, and performance metrics across all your projects.
  • Archive and search: Everything you post becomes a searchable, permanent record. Future you will thank current you when you need to reference when something shipped or changed.
  • Interoperability: RSS and JSON Feed are open standards. Your data isn't locked into Jottings. It's portable.

The Future: APIs and Webhooks

Right now, you can integrate with Jottings through REST API calls. But I'm thinking about what's next:

  • Webhooks so you can react to events (new jot posted, site updated)
  • Custom fields for richer metadata (status, priority, assignee)
  • Batch operations for bulk imports and updates
  • Search API for querying posts by tag, date, or content

The principle remains the same: keep Jottings focused, but make it work with your other tools instead of against them.

Where to Start

If you're interested in integrating Jottings into your workflow:

  1. Create a developer site: Set up a Jottings site for technical updates (deployment announcements, status, changelogs)
  2. Grab your API credentials: We'll show you how to generate tokens for secure API access
  3. Start small: Maybe just post your next deployment. See how it feels. Build from there.
  4. Check out the JSON Feed: Visit /api/v1/sites/{siteId}/feeds/json to see the structure. It's straightforward.

The beauty of Jottings is that you don't have to use it for everything. Use it for what makes sense in your workflow. Maybe that's just deployment announcements. Maybe it's your entire changelog. Maybe it's public incident tracking. Whatever helps you.

I'd love to hear how you integrate Jottings into your development process. The fact that it's designed for the open web means your workflows and integrations inspire better features for everyone else.

Start capturing your updates. The web is waiting.

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