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Blog.txt

curiositry.com

35 pointsCuriositry25 comments

How about something even smaller? Embedding the "site" within the URL?

https://itty.bitty.site/#About/XQAAAAI9BwAAAAAAAAAeHMqHyTY4P...

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.

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?

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

Yes! Is any work being done in this direction?

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?

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" :)

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/

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)

What a shame - my broken concept somewhat fixed by the browsers…

And thank _you_ for having a lightweight site ;)

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.

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

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

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

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

This gives you the power of Regex search. Use responsibly.

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.

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.

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.

Which doesn't address the point.

Really, extending the todo.txt todo-list format (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.

I don't understand all those features you're asking for, but maybe some adaptation of 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.

Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

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.

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