8 ms·

Blog.txt

35 points by Curiositry 5y ago

HermanMartinus 5y ago
https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev has about 5kb pages uncompressed and is a similar idea just not self hosted
eigengrau5150 5y ago
I love this, but I wonder if anybody is crazy enough to configure their web server to serve index.txt by default instead of index.html and dispense with HTML altogether.
gnuarch 5y ago
I wish Firefox could render AsciiDoc, MarkDown etc. natively. There are extensions, though, e.g. https://github.com/simov/markdown-viewer https://github.com/simov/markdown-viewer
- Curiositry 5y ago
  Yes! Is any work being done in this direction?
dang-guefever 5y ago
Really, extending the todo.txt todo-list format (http://todotxt.org http://todotxt.org) to being a blog platform is as simple as having a heredoc style delimiter for each post. Then of course, you're just recreatin org-mode from first principles. Social media is also merely the exchange of plain text and media files. If only we had a simple and free platform that had the following features: * Supports multiple simultaneous users * Has simple user and group access control * Treats everything as a sharable file * Easy for admins to securely deploy out of the box * Easy for users to securely connect out of the box * Uses few enough resources that it can be ran on effectively any computer, no matter how powerful. If only we had such a mythical system, we could decentralize the net. If.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  I don't understand all those features you're asking for, but maybe some adaptation of https://fossil-scm.org https://fossil-scm.org ? It's a wiki, blog, DVCS, and bug tracker all in one program, using sqlite as a backing store. An instance of it runs in about around 2MB of memory on a small vps.
  - dang-guefever 5y ago
    Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
    - throwaway81523 5y ago
      That's an old video promoting Unix, so I don't see what you're getting at. Unix is not a distributed OS. The web has to work over communications channels with fairly high latency, so you don't want a file-system-like interface either. If you have something specific in mind, maybe you could say what it is instead of being coy.
      - dang-guefever 5y ago
        Sorry, if you can't read between the lines at even this point, I doubt being explicit would help.
        throwaway81523 5y ago
        Give it a try maybe.
orf 5y ago
Can’t link to specific posts, and images are obviously a complete mess. Other than that it’s basically markdown without the styling.
- dang-guefever 5y ago
  From TFA: 2021-10-22 - Search =================== #feature Another thing that's useful is to be able to find things on a site. How do I find that post I remember reading that talked about skipping over all the sourdough? Lo and behold, blog.txt has powerful fulltext search: your computer's built in search engine is much better than most blog search engines. Just hit CTRL+F and type "skipping over all the sourdough". Because it's all one page, you can find anything almost instantly, just using your browser's page search. Or you can skip the web browser altogether, and read my blog as it was meant to be read -- in Vim: vim https://www.curiositry.com/blog.txt https://www.curiositry.com/blog.txt This gives you the power of Regex search. Use responsibly.
  - orf 5y ago
    Ok so you can’t link to posts, rendering it useless as a blog. Got it. Edit: to the person below who got way to offended by this, newspapers are indexed by page. You don’t say “perform a linear scan through all 50 pages until you find an article with X in the title”, you say “check out the article on page 12”. That’s a hyperlink.
    - dang-guefever 5y ago
      To the edit, you mean like, I don't know, referring to a unique date, key, and/or title? Yeah, that's simply impossible to do or manage in plaintext. Impossible. I would direct you to Melvil Dewey, but I don't think you'd get the reference.
      - orf 5y ago
        I’m not sure why you’ve got such a chip on your shoulder for terrible ideas such as this, or why you feel it’s appropriate to post comments with that tone. It makes you sound less intelligent than you clearly think you are. Linking directly to a resource is a good thing. Nobody is saying it’s impossible to emulate linking with a single text file, I’m saying its a bad idea and a very, very poor user experience for regularly updated linear content like a blog. Go ahead, publish your blog as as a giant text file. Or go ahead and print it on one giant continuous bit of paper and throw it out your window, if your aim is to disseminate your writing to an audience both are equally as effective.
montroser 5y ago
Good stuff. Once note though, line wrapping on mobile is very awkward for me. The pre-wrapped lines are longer than fit in my viewport, so I end up with all these left over stubs each spilling onto a short subsequent every-other line. This actually seems like a hard problem to solve? If you just don't pre-wrap lines, then mobile is better, but desktop may end up showing way too many characters per line. But at least the user is on control then, and they can resize their window however they like. Wikipedia has no max-width set, and people deal with it well enough... Is there any other non-HTML/CSS option?
- Curiositry 5y ago
  Thank you montroser. This is something that really bugged me, when I (belatedly) tested it on mobile. I had to chose between optimizing for mobile, and optimizing for desktop, and I chose the latter. To have a good experience on mobile, you have to use landscape mode, or reduce your font size. Since it is still readable on mobile, I figured that the people who were interested in the content would know how to — and take the time to — rotate their phone so the images such would display properly. I switched to shorter hard wrapping, so that phones with wide screens would look OK. But I found that a standard smartphone has so little horizontal screen space that no matter how short I wrapped it, it would overflow (and look just ridiculous on desktop). Also, I couldn't wrap it as much as I wanted to, because of the image I had chosen, which is fixed width. Admittedly, wrapping on mobile — and fixed-width images in specific — is one biggest issues with this "idea" :)
- eigengrau5150 5y ago
  I used the reader mode that Firefox provides on Android. It solved most of the issues but mangled the ascii art. Oh, well. I suppose that if OP cared, they could write a tiny shell script to wrap blog.txt inside HTML <pre> with some inline CSS to provide word-wrapping.
throwaway81523 5y ago
Reminds me of Mike Jittlov's "make big money" post that I can't find on his site right now. Here is a mirror: https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/BigMoney.html https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/BigMoney.html
ksec 5y ago
How about something even smaller? Embedding the "site" within the URL? https://itty.bitty.site/#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 https://itty.bitty.site/#About/XQAAAAI9BwAAAAAAAAAeHMqHyTY4P...
- sidpatil 5y ago
  One step further would be to embed your entire site in a data: URI. The biggest limitation would be the resulting length—you'd likely run into character limits when trying to share it on message boards and social media.
- Curiositry 5y ago
  You get your money back. Now I remember running across that before. I had forgotten about it. The character limit is a bit troublesome, though, and if you have room to paste a link that long, why not just paste the contents?
e4d5 5y ago
I do like the dark mode theme on the website, as well as the "hacker"-style monospace font. I would be happy to see more web sites on the internet use this blogging platform.
bradley_taunt 5y ago
This would be awesome if the line wrapping issue was perfected on mobile. For something less efficient and more stupid, I created Super Pseudo[0] a while back. Full website where all the content is solely in CSS. [0] https://super-pseudo.netlify.app/ https://super-pseudo.netlify.app/
- Curiositry 5y ago
  Haha, excellent! It seems that the content is now searchable in the browser, though, making it less useless than it once was :) P.S. Thanks for making 1mb.club (of which I am a member)
  - bradley_taunt 5y ago
    What a shame - my broken concept somewhat fixed by the browsers… And thank _you_ for having a lightweight site ;)
eigengrau5150 5y ago
I took your idea and ran with it because I just want to shitpost on my own platform without going through the headaches of actually maintaining a webshite. https://eigenschwarz.org/ https://eigenschwarz.org/ (Hey, dang: FUCK YOU. Ban me already, you chickenshit excuse for a moderator.)

35 points by Curiositry 5y ago

https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev has about 5kb pages uncompressed and is a similar idea just not self hosted

I love this, but I wonder if anybody is crazy enough to configure their web server to serve index.txt by default instead of index.html and dispense with HTML altogether.

gnuarch 5y ago

I wish Firefox could render AsciiDoc, MarkDown etc. natively. There are extensions, though, e.g. https://github.com/simov/markdown-viewer https://github.com/simov/markdown-viewer

Curiositry 5y ago
Yes! Is any work being done in this direction?

dang-guefever 5y ago

Really, extending the todo.txt todo-list format (http://todotxt.org http://todotxt.org) to being a blog platform is as simple as having a heredoc style delimiter for each post. Then of course, you're just recreatin org-mode from first principles. Social media is also merely the exchange of plain text and media files. If only we had a simple and free platform that had the following features: * Supports multiple simultaneous users * Has simple user and group access control * Treats everything as a sharable file * Easy for admins to securely deploy out of the box * Easy for users to securely connect out of the box * Uses few enough resources that it can be ran on effectively any computer, no matter how powerful. If only we had such a mythical system, we could decentralize the net. If.

throwaway81523 5y ago
I don't understand all those features you're asking for, but maybe some adaptation of https://fossil-scm.org https://fossil-scm.org ? It's a wiki, blog, DVCS, and bug tracker all in one program, using sqlite as a backing store. An instance of it runs in about around 2MB of memory on a small vps.
- dang-guefever 5y ago
  Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    That's an old video promoting Unix, so I don't see what you're getting at. Unix is not a distributed OS. The web has to work over communications channels with fairly high latency, so you don't want a file-system-like interface either. If you have something specific in mind, maybe you could say what it is instead of being coy.
    - dang-guefever 5y ago
      Sorry, if you can't read between the lines at even this point, I doubt being explicit would help.
      - throwaway81523 5y ago
        Give it a try maybe.

orf 5y ago

Can’t link to specific posts, and images are obviously a complete mess. Other than that it’s basically markdown without the styling.

dang-guefever 5y ago
From TFA: 2021-10-22 - Search =================== #feature Another thing that's useful is to be able to find things on a site. How do I find that post I remember reading that talked about skipping over all the sourdough? Lo and behold, blog.txt has powerful fulltext search: your computer's built in search engine is much better than most blog search engines. Just hit CTRL+F and type "skipping over all the sourdough". Because it's all one page, you can find anything almost instantly, just using your browser's page search. Or you can skip the web browser altogether, and read my blog as it was meant to be read -- in Vim: vim https://www.curiositry.com/blog.txt https://www.curiositry.com/blog.txt This gives you the power of Regex search. Use responsibly.
- orf 5y ago
  Ok so you can’t link to posts, rendering it useless as a blog. Got it. Edit: to the person below who got way to offended by this, newspapers are indexed by page. You don’t say “perform a linear scan through all 50 pages until you find an article with X in the title”, you say “check out the article on page 12”. That’s a hyperlink.
  - dang-guefever 5y ago
    To the edit, you mean like, I don't know, referring to a unique date, key, and/or title? Yeah, that's simply impossible to do or manage in plaintext. Impossible. I would direct you to Melvil Dewey, but I don't think you'd get the reference.
    - orf 5y ago
      I’m not sure why you’ve got such a chip on your shoulder for terrible ideas such as this, or why you feel it’s appropriate to post comments with that tone. It makes you sound less intelligent than you clearly think you are. Linking directly to a resource is a good thing. Nobody is saying it’s impossible to emulate linking with a single text file, I’m saying its a bad idea and a very, very poor user experience for regularly updated linear content like a blog. Go ahead, publish your blog as as a giant text file. Or go ahead and print it on one giant continuous bit of paper and throw it out your window, if your aim is to disseminate your writing to an audience both are equally as effective.

montroser 5y ago

Good stuff. Once note though, line wrapping on mobile is very awkward for me. The pre-wrapped lines are longer than fit in my viewport, so I end up with all these left over stubs each spilling onto a short subsequent every-other line. This actually seems like a hard problem to solve? If you just don't pre-wrap lines, then mobile is better, but desktop may end up showing way too many characters per line. But at least the user is on control then, and they can resize their window however they like. Wikipedia has no max-width set, and people deal with it well enough... Is there any other non-HTML/CSS option?

Curiositry 5y ago
Thank you montroser. This is something that really bugged me, when I (belatedly) tested it on mobile. I had to chose between optimizing for mobile, and optimizing for desktop, and I chose the latter. To have a good experience on mobile, you have to use landscape mode, or reduce your font size. Since it is still readable on mobile, I figured that the people who were interested in the content would know how to — and take the time to — rotate their phone so the images such would display properly. I switched to shorter hard wrapping, so that phones with wide screens would look OK. But I found that a standard smartphone has so little horizontal screen space that no matter how short I wrapped it, it would overflow (and look just ridiculous on desktop). Also, I couldn't wrap it as much as I wanted to, because of the image I had chosen, which is fixed width. Admittedly, wrapping on mobile — and fixed-width images in specific — is one biggest issues with this "idea" :)
eigengrau5150 5y ago
I used the reader mode that Firefox provides on Android. It solved most of the issues but mangled the ascii art. Oh, well. I suppose that if OP cared, they could write a tiny shell script to wrap blog.txt inside HTML <pre> with some inline CSS to provide word-wrapping.

throwaway81523 5y ago

Reminds me of Mike Jittlov's "make big money" post that I can't find on his site right now. Here is a mirror: https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/BigMoney.html https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/BigMoney.html

ksec 5y ago

How about something even smaller? Embedding the "site" within the URL? https://itty.bitty.site/#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 https://itty.bitty.site/#About/XQAAAAI9BwAAAAAAAAAeHMqHyTY4P...

sidpatil 5y ago
One step further would be to embed your entire site in a data: URI. The biggest limitation would be the resulting length—you'd likely run into character limits when trying to share it on message boards and social media.
Curiositry 5y ago
You get your money back. Now I remember running across that before. I had forgotten about it. The character limit is a bit troublesome, though, and if you have room to paste a link that long, why not just paste the contents?

e4d5 5y ago

I do like the dark mode theme on the website, as well as the "hacker"-style monospace font. I would be happy to see more web sites on the internet use this blogging platform.

bradley_taunt 5y ago

This would be awesome if the line wrapping issue was perfected on mobile. For something less efficient and more stupid, I created Super Pseudo[0] a while back. Full website where all the content is solely in CSS. [0] https://super-pseudo.netlify.app/ https://super-pseudo.netlify.app/

Curiositry 5y ago
Haha, excellent! It seems that the content is now searchable in the browser, though, making it less useless than it once was :) P.S. Thanks for making 1mb.club (of which I am a member)
- bradley_taunt 5y ago
  What a shame - my broken concept somewhat fixed by the browsers… And thank _you_ for having a lightweight site ;)

eigengrau5150 5y ago

I took your idea and ran with it because I just want to shitpost on my own platform without going through the headaches of actually maintaining a webshite. https://eigenschwarz.org/ https://eigenschwarz.org/ (Hey, dang: FUCK YOU. Ban me already, you chickenshit excuse for a moderator.)