Documentation

Everything you need to know about weeknotes.me — the practice itself, the editor, attachments, RSS and podcast feeds, your profile, and the bits underneath. Written to be read top-to-bottom the first time and skimmed by anchor afterwards.

If you're brand new and just want to write something, skip to Getting started. If you're trying to make sense of a specific feature, the contents below jump straight to it.

What a week note is
Getting started
Writing your week note
Markdown reference
How "this week" is decided
Photos and voice memos
Publishing, drafts, and edits
Backfilling past weeks
Your profile
RSS feeds
Podcast mode
Friday email nudges
Light, dark, and system themes
Account, sign-in, and privacy
Brand and references
Troubleshooting

1. What a week note is

A week note is a short, honest post about your week. What you worked on, what you learned, what you're stuck on, and what caught your eye. There's no template you have to follow and no minimum length to clear. Three sentences is fine. So is two thousand words.

The practice came out of design and engineering studios in the mid-2000s — places like BERG in London wrote them publicly as a way to share progress without the weight of a proper blog post. Phil Gyford has kept up his weekly posts for years. Buster Benson's year in review is a good argument for why the habit pays off. Giles Turnbull wrote a short guide to how and why.

The point isn't to publish something polished. It's to leave yourself a paper trail. A year of week notes is fifty short snapshots of what you cared about, what you tried, and what you abandoned. Read end to end, they tell you things about yourself that you can't see from inside any single week. That's the payoff. The act of writing matters more than what you write.

What to put in

The easiest scaffold is four prompts. Don't feel obliged to use all four; pick whichever ones fit your week.

What I did. The shipped, finished, done things — and the half-finished ones.
What I learned. Something that surprised you. A correction to a previous belief. A new word.
What I'm stuck on. Stating the problem out loud is half the work of solving it.
What caught my eye. A link, a book, a conversation, a photo of the sky on Tuesday.

That last one matters more than people think. Week notes work best when they aren't only about output. The texture of the week — what you read, who you saw, what the light was doing — is what makes them readable a year later.

How long, how often

Aim for short and specific over long and general. "I read The Dispossessed on the train" beats "I've been reading a lot lately." Once a week, ideally on the same day. Friday afternoon and Sunday evening are the two most common slots — Friday because the week is fresh, Sunday because it sets up the next one. Pick whichever you'll actually do.

2. Getting started

Sign up from the homepage: pick a username, give an email, and we'll send a sign-in link plus a 6-digit code. Either signs you in. There are no passwords on weeknotes.me; sign-in is always email-based.

Once you're in, you have:

A public profile at /yourname that lists your published notes.
A per-user RSS feed at /yourname/rss that readers can subscribe to in any feed reader.
The editor at /write, which always opens to the current ISO week's draft.
A Settings page for your photo, bio, location, theme, nudge preference, and podcast feed.

Open the editor, write a sentence about the week so far, and hit Publish. The first one is the hardest; after about four, you'll have a rhythm.

3. Writing your week note

The editor at /write is a quiet two-pane surface: a title input and a markdown body. There are two buttons next to the title — one for photos, one for voice memos — and that's the whole toolbar. Everything else is markdown.

Drafts save automatically every few seconds; the status word next to the Publish button tells you when. There's no "save" button to forget. A note is private until you press Publish.

A title is required to publish — the body is not. An empty body with a title and a voice memo, for example, is a valid note; that's how some people use the service as an audio diary.

4. Markdown reference

weeknotes.me uses GitHub-flavored markdown. Everything you'd expect works:

Headings: # H1 through ###### H6.
Emphasis: *italic*, **bold**, ~~strikethrough~~.
Links: [label](https://example.com). External links open in a new tab and get rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow ugc" automatically — you don't need to add it.
Images: ![alt](url). Photos uploaded via the photo button are inserted as image markdown automatically.
Lists: -, *, or 1. for ordered. Nest with two-space indents.
Quotes: > line.
Code: backticks for inline, triple backticks for blocks. Language tags (```ts) survive the render.
Tables: the standard pipe-and-dash GFM syntax.
Horizontal rule: --- on its own line.

Voice-memo links — markdown links pointing at /i/...with an audio extension — are rendered as inline <audio> players, not plain links. The voice button in the editor inserts one of these automatically.

Markdown is sanitized server-side: raw <script>, <iframe>, onclick handlers, and javascript: URLs are stripped before render. You can include a small allowlist of HTML inline (<mark>, <sub>, <sup>) if you need it, but most posts don't.

Notes are capped at 100,000 characters of markdown source — enough for a very long essay, far more than a week note needs.

5. How "this week" is decided

weeknotes.me follows ISO 8601 week numbering. Weeks run Monday to Sunday. Week 1 of any year is the week containing the first Thursday of that year — which means a year can have 52 or 53 ISO weeks, and the first few days of January sometimes belong to the last week of the previous year (e.g. 1 January 2023 was 2022-W52).

The URL for each note is its ISO week, formatted as /yourname/yy/ww — so the note for week 14 of 2025 lives at /yourname/25/14. The 2-digit year keeps URLs short and works fine until 2099.

"This week" is decided in your local timezone, not UTC. If it's Monday morning in London but still Sunday evening in San Francisco, a London user opening the editor sees the new week and a San Francisco user sees the old one. Set your location in Settings so this works correctly; the dropdown also auto-detects your timezone in the browser and offers a one-click switch.

You can write one note per ISO week. If you miss a week, leave it blank — there's no streak to break.

6. Photos and voice memos

Words aren't the only way in. The editor has photo and voice-memo buttons next to the title — useful for capturing something the text can't quite reach.

Photos

Tap the camera icon to pick one or several. You can also drag-and-drop or paste images directly into the editor. Each photo can be up to 10 MB, in any common browser-supported format (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, HEIC). Each upload becomes an image-markdown reference in the body, which you're free to move, caption, or delete.

Photos are stored on Cloudflare R2 and served from /i/.... Removing the image markdown from the body garbage-collects the underlying file when the draft is saved, so an unwanted upload doesn't linger.

Voice memos

Tap the microphone icon to record straight from the browser — no separate app needed. Recordings are limited to 5 minutes and 10 MB, and are converted to MP3 in your browser before upload. MP3 is the one format that plays everywhere — every browser, every podcast app, every email client — so we lock to it.

A voice memo appears in the rendered note as a small inline audio player. It's also a way to start when the writing won't come: talk for a minute, paste a line of context above it, and call it done.

Attachment limits per note

Up to 8 attachments per note (photos and the like).
Plus 1 voice memo per note.
10 MB per file.

These are deliberate. A week note with 30 photos and four recordings is no longer a week note; it's a photo album with text. The caps keep notes readable and the per-user RSS feed light enough to be a real subscription rather than a media archive.

7. Publishing, drafts, and edits

A note is a private draft until you press Publish. Drafts don't appear on your profile, in any RSS feed, or in search engines. Drafts auto-save every few seconds while you type.

Publishing makes the note visible at /yourname/yy/ww, adds it to your profile, and includes it in your RSS feed. Editing a published note is fine — the URL stays the same and the RSS feed updates on next fetch. Republishing doesn't bump the post to the top of feed readers; the original publish date is what feed software uses for ordering.

Unpublishing puts the note back into draft state — the URL starts returning a 404 again, and the RSS entry disappears on the next regeneration. You can re-publish from the same draft later. Deleting a note is permanent and removes it from feeds and any attached photos and voice memos along with it.

8. Backfilling past weeks

You can write notes for past weeks at /write/yy/ww. For example, /write/24/03 opens (or creates) the draft for week 3 of 2024.

Future weeks are not allowed. The route quietly 404s if you try.

Backfilling is useful for two cases: importing notes you wrote elsewhere into your weeknotes.me archive, and writing one missed week without breaking your stride on the current one. There's no penalty either way — see the philosophy; the practice isn't about streaks.

9. Your profile

Your public profile lives at /yourname. It's the page people land on if they hear about you, and it's the archive you'll skim a year from now.

Customisable bits, all in Settings:

Display name. Optional. If unset, your username is shown. Up to 80 characters.
Bio. One short line — up to 200 characters. Required if you want to turn on Podcast mode, since it's reused as the podcast description.
Photo. Cropped to a square and stored at 1400×1400. The same image is also re-encoded with a tiny italic w wordmark in the corner; that watermarked variant is what the podcast feed uses as cover art and what social previews show as the og:image.
Website. Optional. Shown as a small chip on your profile and included in your RSS feed metadata. Bare hostnames are auto-prefixed with https://.
Location. Pick a city. The timezone half decides what "this week" means in the editor; the country half decides what label appears next to your local time on your profile (e.g. "UK · Sun 07:54").

Usernames are not currently changeable. If this is a blocker, drop a note via the address listed in Terms and we'll see what's possible.

10. RSS feeds

Every account gets a per-user RSS feed automatically — no switch, no setting.

Per-user feed

Lives at /yourname/rss. Includes your published notes in reverse chronological order, with full markdown rendered to HTML and any voice memos linked as enclosures. Point any feed reader (NetNewsWire, Feedbin, Inoreader, Reeder, Feedly, FreshRSS, etc.) at it.

The feed is cached briefly — usually a minute or two — and invalidated immediately when you publish or edit a note. Subscribers see updates on their next fetch.

The global feed

/feed shows every recent note from everyone writing here, newest first, and /rss is the same list as a feed you can subscribe to. There's no ranking and no algorithm behind it — the order is the order things were published in.

The global feed carries excerpts rather than full notes; follow someone's per-user feed if you want their writing in full. Publishing a note puts it at the top of both within a minute or two.

11. Podcast mode

Podcast mode is a switch in Settings that re-shapes your RSS feed into a valid podcast feed. With it on, any note that contains a voice memo becomes an episode in podcast apps. Notes without voice memos still appear, but podcast apps usually hide them.

What you need before turning it on

A profile photo. The watermarked variant is used as cover art. Apple Podcasts requires this.
A bio. It's reused as the podcast description.
Your email address will be embedded in the feed XML as the owner email. Apple Podcasts requires it for verification. Don't turn this on if that's not acceptable.

Submitting your feed

Once on, the Settings page surfaces direct submission links for the four mainstream apps:

Apple Podcasts — submit via Podcasts Connect. Apple verifies and re-distributes to most downstream apps.
Spotify — submit via Spotify for Creators. Verification is by email.
Pocket Casts — no submission flow; listeners add the URL directly inside the app.
Overcast — same; add by URL inside the app.

Recordings are MP3, so episodes play in any podcast client. Episode artwork falls back to your cover photo. The feed is the same URL whether or not Podcast mode is on — /yourname/rss — so you don't have to update anywhere you've shared the link.

12. Friday email nudges

If Friday-morning nudges are on (they are, by default), you get one short email at 11am local time on Friday if you haven't started this week's note yet. One per week. Never more. The email is plain text with a link to the editor.

Nudges fire from the timezone in your profile, not from UTC, so the timing actually maps to your Friday morning. You can turn them off any time in Settings.

We don't send any other regular email. The other categories are sign-in links (when you log in) and account-related notifications (like a deletion confirmation). No newsletter, no marketing, no digest.

13. Light, dark, and system themes

Three options in Settings:

System follows your operating-system preference and switches when it does.
Light locks to the light palette.
Dark locks to the dark palette.

The choice is stored in a small cookie so logged-out viewers of your public pages see the same theme on revisit. There are no other UI toggles — type size, line width, and serif versus sans are all opinionated defaults.

14. Account, sign-in, and privacy

weeknotes.me has no passwords. Sign in by entering your email on the log in page. We send you a link and a 6-digit code; either signs you in. Codes expire quickly for safety.

Sessions are kept by a single same-site cookie. Logging out destroys it. There's no "remember me" — sessions are long enough that you won't normally have to think about it.

Privacy

We collect the minimum we need to run the service. We don't sell your data. We don't use third-party analytics or advertising trackers. There are no cookies beyond the session and theme cookies. The full breakdown is on the Terms page.

Drafts are private to you. Published notes, your username, display name, avatar, and bio are public — anything you publish is on the open web and may be indexed by search engines or fetched via your RSS feed. Voice memos and photos attached to published notes are publicly addressable at their /i/... URL and not behind any auth wall.

Deleting your account

Available in Settings under "Danger zone". Deletion is immediate and permanent: your account, every published and draft note, and every photo and voice memo attached to them is removed. Your username is released back into the wild and can be claimed by someone else.

Cloudflare retains short-lived request logs that are out of our control; everything else we hold for you goes when you click delete.

15. Brand and references

If you're writing about weeknotes.me, putting the name on a slide, or wiring up a link, the References page has wordmark SVGs in light and dark variants, the glyph, the colour palette in both themes, three lengths of canned description text, and a short do-and-don't section.

16. Troubleshooting

The editor opened the wrong week.

The editor uses your saved timezone to decide which ISO week is "this week". If your location in Settings is set to UTC (the default for new accounts) or to a city that doesn't match where you actually are, the week boundary will look off. Pick the closest city in the Location dropdown and save.

My voice memo won't record.

Browser microphone permission is the usual cause. Look for a microphone icon in your browser's address bar and grant access for weeknotes.me. On iOS, Safari prompts the first time; on macOS, you may also need System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone enabled for your browser. Recordings are converted to MP3 in your browser before upload, which takes a few seconds — the upload doesn't start until the conversion finishes.

I'm not getting Friday nudges.

Check three things, in order: (1) nudges are toggled on in Settings; (2) your location is set to a real city (UTC won't fire correctly); (3) you haven't already started this week's draft — the nudge is suppressed if there's any text or attachment in the current week's draft when 11am rolls around. Also check spam.

Apple Podcasts won't accept my feed.

The two common causes are a missing profile photo (Apple requires cover art) and a missing bio (Apple requires a description). Both are required to enable Podcast mode in the first place, but if you turned it on, then later cleared the photo, the feed will still serve but Apple will reject the submission. Restore both fields and re-submit.

My RSS feed seems stale.

Per-user feeds are cached briefly to absorb traffic spikes and invalidated when you publish or edit. If a recent edit doesn't appear, give it a minute. If something's clearly wrong for longer than that, the contact in Terms is the way to flag it.

Something else.

The shorter FAQ on the About page covers the most common questions. The What's new page lists recent changes that might explain a behaviour shift. If neither helps, the email address in Terms is the place to write.

Open the editor at /write, write a sentence about the week so far, hit Publish.

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