When I’m on a run or a long bike ride, ideas come to me, I can’t really stop to take notes each time an idea comes to me, it would interrupt my exercise too much. I have been looking for a toolset that could help me, so I started with defining my requirements – which are a voice to text on mobile, sync text cloud and sync text cloud to my WordPress blog.
On one of my recent runs I tested the Android version of Evernote, Evernote is an app designed for note-taking and archiving. A “note” can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a scanned handwritten note. Notes can also have file attachments, such as images or PDFs. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, searched and exported.
With Evernote, it’s very easy to add content using your web browser, the desktop client, via email, or even using your smartphone. The clever text recognition feature means that you can search the content of images, e.g. photos of whiteboards or your handwritten notes (assuming it’s not a dreadful scrawl).
Speech to text
I used the Evernote feature called Speech-to-text, that allows me to speak through my mobile headset, and my voice is converted to text.
My first spoke words using Speech-to-text came out this way – “this is phone headset test 1 great if I’m not writing now I’m good to talk I could record what I see thank you”.
Not perfect voice to text translation, I need to improve how I speak to make this more effective as a tool. The nice thing Evernote is that it syncs from your mobile app to the Evernote cloud so you can have access to your notes from any type of device.
My final requirement is to turn my Evernote notes into WordPress blog posts or pages. For that, I’m using the Sentinote plugin, that converts your Evernote notes into WordPress posts or pages.
Create Tags
To make this work seamless you need to add a few new key tags to your Evernote, they are “published”, “page” and “draft”.
To use the tags, apply them to the Evernote note that you create, this will tell Sentinote which notes to sync from Evernote to your WordPress blog.
Tagging your notes lets you distinguish between posts and pages as described in the table.
| Tag | Usage |
|---|---|
| published | Lets Sentinote knows that this note should be synced to your WordPress. The default post type is a standard blog post. All notes to appear in WordPress MUST be tagged with ‘published’ |
| page | Changes the note’s post format from standard blog post to a standard WordPress page. |
| draft | Changes the note’s status to draft. This post will not be visible to site visitors. |
For more tag options see the Sentinote documentation.
Here is how I set up Notebooks in Evernote, I created a Notebook called WordPress, all the notes that I want to be synced to my WordPress blog I add in the WordPress Notebook.
You need to set a few parameters in WordPress for the Sentinote plugin to work with Evernote, the key parameters are Evernote Developer Token and Evernote Notebook name to use sync with, in my cases, I created in Evernote a Notebook called WordPress.
You can also configure the frequency the Sentinote plugin will check your Evernote Notebook – I have set it to once daily, which is sufficient with how I use it. There are also options to set for Default Author and Default Category.
Evernote is what’s called freemium software, meaning there are both free and premium versions available. The free version applies certain restrictions on the amount of data you can upload and the maximum size of each note. there are lots of tutorials on the Evernote website and beyond.
I like Evernote, but I’d love to hear of any good alternatives and what experiences you have. And please do let me know how you use Evernote.
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