geoffreymcgill

I work on Retype. We're loving using Obsidian to edit our .md files but also need a low-effort solution for publishing.

Some of the projects we're working on are generating heaps of markdown files, so it's been nice to build and run a quality docs website directly from Obsidian.

Markdown first, no vendor lock-in, self-hosted.

I’m the author of Retype. I wrote this guide as a practical walkthrough for self-hosting an Obsidian vault. I’d really appreciate your feedback or ideas on what could be improved.

If you need an option to publish your notes online, check out Retype (https://retype.com). You can use Obsidian or GitBook or any Markdown files as your GUI editor and generate a static website using Retype.

My understanding is that the $64.25M in "bidding" wasn’t real, as it was likely done with chandelier bids. Essentially fake phantom bids placed by the auctioneer to simulate interest and push the price upward. It’s a common tactic, but many see it as deceptive, especially when it creates the illusion of genuine demand.

I met plenty of Americans in both Iran and North Korea. American tourists often receive extra interest and admiration from the locals, who express a genuine warmth and fascination towards them.

> was there anything fascinating about North Korea that you couldn't have gotten from South Korea

yes, a different perspective.

EDIT/ADD:

Witness one of the world’s most secretive states, firsthand experience of a communist regime, dynastic leadership, and a pervasive cult of personality.

I've been to both and can report a positive experience. The DPRK trip was fascinating. The thing I remember most about Iran is how friendly everyone was to us.

How about Retype? https://retype.com

GitBook is a static site generator, essentially. Just wrapped in an online UI.

MDX is interesting and powerful, although creates all kinds of portability issues and is a terribly leaky abstraction of what should be a simple content syntax. Very much (IMHO) against the ethos and beauty of Markdown.

> or may disappear entirely is due to the lock-in and vanishing of previous tools I've used.

Another important point. Retype is distributed via NPM and NuGet (.NET) package managers. Once a release is published, we can't walk it back or remove it from the internet. There's also no gate-keeping with Retype or gate-keeping of content. You control the content, generation, and hosting. Retype cannot in any way disable or remove your website. Again, for better or worse, I'm not sure, but you are autonomous and anonymous to Retype, and at least the app, cannot disappear.

> I may give it a go on one project, but I can't see myself committing completely.

That would be most excellent. I would greatly value your feedback.

Hope this helps.

Sorry for the wall of text.

> but it represents some amount of lock-in (though, less than typical since the everything is mostly plain markdown)

This is an important point. Retype has been developed with the explicit goal of preventing lock-in. For better or worse, I'm not sure, but the point of the app is that you are not locked-in by design. You 100% control the original source of all your data and that data is being stored in the absolute simplest of forms being just static text files. Your data is not squirrelled away in a proprietary app, or sass service, or spread across tables in some database. Sure, you (or whomever) might be skilled enough to extract that data back out of the database, but that scenario is certainly the exception, and certainly will never ever be as simple as just plain text files stored in a folder.

In the future, you might decide Retype is not for you, or a better system comes around, no problem. You control ALL the data. Just switch to a different generator. There's no exporting data out of some system and hoping you fetch everything, assuming you can even get the data cleanly out of a system.

Even gitbook is not that clean. You can mostly export your content out of gitbook, but that does include everything. They give your content back, although that is not enough to recreate the site with configuration.

Yes, there are a handful of Retype specific Markdown components that enable convenient UI components such as Tabs, Panels, and Buttons, but... those exist in all static site generators and Retype has by far implemented the cleanest syntax solution. That solution, by design, is also the easiest to port away from. Maybe the system you move to in the future does not support the exact same syntax, but it will be trivial to port from the Retype syntax to another.

For instance, compare the Retype Tab component syntax (https://retype.com/components/tab/) to docusaurus (https://docusaurus.io/docs/markdown-features/tabs), which is actually relatively clean compared to the mess that gets exported from gitbook. BTW, Retype 100% supports the block of Tab code exported by gitbook, so your site will "just work" without being required to do any cleanup of their exported syntax.

I would love to add many more components to Retype. It would be trivial to do, but I explicitly do not because I want to try and avoid vendor lock-in. If a better system comes around in the future, even I want to be able to port my project as easily as possible.

While gitbook does wrap the branching/merging process in a UI that is digestible by non-developers, Retype is far more powerful because you actually use GitHub (or GitLab). You have the full power of GitHub, including branching, pull-requests, issues, reviews, automation, authentication, and everything else.

For example, here's the repo for the retype.com website, see https://github.com/retypeapp/retype

The entire website is built from simple Markdown text files.

BookStack looks interesting, but certainly one massive advantage Retype has is just installation. I can have Retype installed, my website built, and running in a browser in a 10 seconds.

With Retype, your content source are simple Markdown `.md` text files. BookStack stores your data in a database, and in order to host a website you need a PHP webserver, Maria DB, etc.

A Retype generated website can be hosted for free using GitHub Pages. The retype.com website is hosted on GitHub Pages, see https://github.com/retypeapp/retype.

Hope this helps.

Ya, I've thought about open-sourcing the project many times, but there doesn't seem to be much upside.

Retype builds directly off Markdown files, which you can store anywhere, including GitHub. The retype.com website is built directly from a GitHub repo, see https://github.com/retypeapp/retype

The retype.com website is also hosted on GitHub Pages. Any change that is committed to the GitHub repo will trigger the website to be rebuilt by Retype using GitHub Actions, see https://retype.com/hosting/github-pages/.

Hope this helps clarify that Retype is even more tightly integrated with GitHub, or any other source management system. You have complete control and ownership of your source content files.

Replaced the Pro link in the header with Pricing and added Retype Pro link in the left sidebar main nav. Hope this helps.

I added a link in the footer to the License. Certainly was not my intention in any way hide the license. Hope this helps.

> The page limits, while high, are somewhat unsettling.

Can you explain this _unsettling_ comment further? Do you find the limits too low? A lot of research was put into the 100 page as I found only about 3% of projects ever went >100 pages.

> I would want to apply this to a handful of my open source projects which would already require ~$200-$300 (yearly should I want updates).

Just so it's clear, that would only be if each of those projects individually were >100 pages.

Thanks for the excellent feedback. We'll definitely add something to the home page which makes the Pro option more visible.

Free for projects with up to 100 content pages. Pro pricing will be available for 5-10x lower than GitBook. Self hosting of the generated website, which isn't possible with GitBook. Ability to remove `Powered by` branding, which again isn't possible with GitBook. I guess those are the high level features. Hope this helps.

Cool. New Examples Explorer too, see https://examples.ext.net. Let me know what you think.

A chart to help visualize some of those countries...

https://i.imgur.com/WrYORJL.png

Sweden passed France in relative Total Deaths the very next day.

https://i.imgur.com/2iBcWi2.png

Big spike in confirmed cases for Sweden yesterday:

https://i.imgur.com/Wca1VeY.png

I'm not sure what changed.

If France and Sweden were the same population, here's a chart of confirmed cases (7 day average) and total deaths.

https://i.imgur.com/oiybcsx.png

Sweden will easily pass France in the next few days, yet new infections are now 500% greater than those of France.

Again, please keep in mind this is a per capita chart.

Making a comparison of Sweden (10,094,432 population) vs Czech Republic (10,707,502 population) seems to reveal a very different story.

New cases (7 day average): https://i.imgur.com/fciq4Ra.png

Total deaths: https://i.imgur.com/do9Zbvn.png

OpenSilver is built with C# compiled to run on the web using https://bridge.net

Ext.NET includes Ext JS (currently, v7.1.0) as its client-side component UI. The new Ext.NET 7.0 release provides 100% coverage of all Sencha Ext JS components to use in ASP.NET Core apps, such as Razor Pages or MVC.

Release info: https://ext.net/download/#version

Cool. Thanks for the excellent feedback! Bridge was so much fun to build. Hopefully, we'll get to take another big crack at the project again.

Check for browser extensions|plugins that might be prevent "fingerprinting". These plugins often disable WebGL support by default.