In order to publish my personal projects/pages (and most of my teaching materials, hundreds of pages) on #Codeberg, I need to convert #markdown files into #HTML and sprinkle some CSS & JS from a layout template, like #GitHub’s Pages #Jekyll does, but I dread the complexity of installing and tending to Jekyll or Hugo or other static site generators, and I can’t even imagine going near Forejo Actions or any sort of CI intergration.

Should I be brave and do the Jekyll /static generator thing? Any other ideas for poor, overworked, stressed out, clumsy people? :(

There is a missing feature I’ve been intending to add to though, which is that any link that looks like a URL that might be an image, for example, ends with .png or .jpg or whatever, we should just render that as an image and not expect users to wrap it in Markdown image links ![](...)

Looks like here’s something wrong with Markdown parsing. 🤔 The original twt looks like this:

>This extension was turned off because it is no longer supported

Thanks Google.
This browser was uninstalled because it absolutely sucks!

So only the first line should be a quote.

@prologic@twtxt.net I am finding writing my Notes very therapeutic. Just create a markdown file and commit, push, and it’s live. Whatever comes to mind, whatever I want to keep as relevant. Silly things, more like a dump.

If I feel like it, I do. If not, I don’t. Not social, not intended for anyone to see them. I am enjoying it!

i feel so powerful i wrote a 3 line script that takes an inputted markdown filename from the current working directory and then spits out a nicely formatted html page. pandoc does all the work i did nothing

oh out of boredom yesterday i made my blog available via markdown files too so you can use charmbracelet/glow to read them in your terminal :)

basically i just set up a file directory on a path of my blog, organized the MD files by year, and so in theory you can navigate to that path and choose a folder, then copy a link to a markdown post and run this:

glow -p https://bubblegum.girlonthemoon.xyz/md/2025/2025-03-31%20premature%20reflections%20on%20sudden%20responsibility.md

and then as long as you have glow installed, you can read my posts from the terminal :D it’s so cool

@arne@uplegger.eu I’m very glad I only rarely have to deal with .docx & Co. And when I have to, 99% is in read mode only. Even though, I don’t think that Markdown is the best choice, I use it on a daily basis. Some things, like links, in reStructuredText are better in my opinion.

Jira just resists to switch to Markdown and forces us to use its silly markup language.

For real typesetting, LaTeX is the way to go. But I very, very rarely do that.

Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish - a nice article about Markdown VS proprietary formatting. With quotes like “Microsoft Office works in an office where you pretend to work until you can finally go home.” 😄

it seems I don’t know how to do Markdown 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz It’s there, but yarnd’s markdown library probably thinks that it’s some broken HTML and swallows it, not sure.

Image

I’d need to think about it deeply, but at a first sight, nanoblogging would be a simple text (like the original twtxt spec, aimed for TUIs), and microblogging (like Twitter was a few years ago), would be about sharing texts, images, videos, GIFs, links, and perhaps Markdown styling.

Why? You have shorter messages than in a blog, but you may add almost anything you could do in a blog.
Buuut… who knows?

I have released new updates to the twtxt.el client.

• Markdown to Org mode (you need to install Pandoc).
  
• Centred column.
  
• Added new logo.
  
• Added text helper.
  

The new version I will try to finish the visual thread. You still can’t see the thread yet.

Video

@prologic@twtxt.net Looks great with the new logo.

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net All the URL are missing the protocol part (https://) and my markdown parser does not know how to handle but I see yarnd does it just fine.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org
it look like your markdown image tags are missing the protocol part (https://) so they don’t render at least on my server: https://darch.dk/timeline/conv/3vtnszq

Some satisfying icicle-breaking in our backyard: photos.falsifian.org/video/sM7G3vfS6yuc/VID_20250217_203250.mp4

I couldn’t resist taking home a prize:

Image

Image

It’s been snowy here in #Toronto.

Image

(I tried formatting the images in markdown for the benefit of yarn and any other clients that understand it.)

#photo #photos #winter

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net the markdown list in #jr6ywrq is a “loose” list, e.g. https://github.com/erusev/parsedown/issues/474#issuecomment-280874843
My markdown parser (parsedown PHP) renders the list with p-tags also.

Added support for uploading images to to #Timeline

Image

Für heute reicht es dann auch mal. Neue Funktionen:

• Login-Bereich
  
• Wechsler zwischen Zeitachse und Unterhaltung
  
• Paginierung nur noch, wenn benötigt
  
• Twtxt-Parsing optimiert (Parser-Plugins für: Youtube, iFrames, Bilder, Erwähnungen, kaputtes HTML, …)
  
• unter der Haube aufgeräumt
  

Die bisher verwendeten ext. Bibliotheken sind:

• josantonius/session - Sessionverwaltung
  
• typo3fluid/fluid - Templating
  
• phpfastcache/phpfastcache - Caching
  
• erusev/parsedown - Markdown

@prologic@twtxt.net you change something up on how markdown gets rendered?

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not exactly asking yarnd to change. If you are okay with the way it displayed my twts, then by all means, leave it as is. I hope you won’t mind if I continue to write things like 1/4 to mean “first out of four”.

What has text/markdown got to do with this? I don’t think Markdown says anything about replacing 1/4 with ¼, or other similar transformations. It’s not needed, because ¼ is already a unicode character that can simply be directly inserted into the text file.

What’s wrong with my original suggestion of doing the transformation before the text hits the twtxt.txt file? @prologic@twtxt.net, I think it would achieve what you are trying to achieve with this content-type thing: if someone writes 1/4 on a yarnd instance or any other client that wants to do this, it would get transformed, and other clients simply wouldn’t do the transformation. Every client that supports displaying unicode characters, including Jenny, would then display ¼ as ¼.

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My 1/4 -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

(#2024-09-24T12:45:54Z) @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not really buying this one about readability. It’s easy to recognize that this is a URL and a date, so you skim over it like you would we mentions and markdown links and images. If you are not suppose to read the raw file, then we might a well jam everything into JSON like mastodon

@bender@twtxt.net Ha! Maybe I should get on the Markdown train. You’re taking away my excuses.

@bender@twtxt.net

Sorry, you’re right, I should have used numbers!

I’m don’t understand what “preserve the original hash” could mean other than “make sure there’s still a twt in the feed with that hash”. Maybe the text could be clarified somehow.

I’m also not sure what you mean by markdown already being part of it. Of course people can already use Markdown, just like presumably nothing stopped people from using (twt subjects) before they were formally described. But it’s not universal; e.g. as a jenny user I just see the plain text.

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.

i feel like we should isolate a subset of markdown that makes sense and built it into lextwt. it already has support for links and images. maybe basic formatting bold, italic. possibly block quote and bullet lists. no tables or footnotes

Twtxt spec enhancement proposal thread 🧵

Adding attributes to individual twts similar to adding feed attributes in the heading comments.

https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/go-lextwt/pulls/17

The basic use case would be for multilingual feeds where there is a default language and some twts will be written a different language.

As seen in the wild: https://eapl.mx/twtxt.txt

The attributes are formatted as [key=value]

They can show up in the twt anywhere it is not enclosed by another element such as codeblock or part of a markdown link.

@eapl.me@eapl.me kinda like the format for markdown images? ![alt](url 'title') ?

Hey Apple, it’s 2023 - about time to start supporting the content indexation of markdown files in Spotlight out of the box, don’t you think?

Hey Apple, it’s 2023 - about time to start supporting the content indexation of markdown files in Spotlight out of the box, don’t you think?

I setup Joplin with caddy as the WebDAV server. Works okay. The e2e encryption can get messed up sometimes. Supports markdown and images.

An option would be to have /twtxt.txt be the base functionality as bukket intended without subject tags, markdown, images and such truncated to 140 chars. a /yarn.txt that has all the extentions as we know and love. and maybe a /.well-known/webfinger + (TBD endpoint) that adds on the crypto enhancements that further extend things.

@prologic@twtxt.net The parse is correct. this seems to be something with the markdown render.

The parse is correct. this seems to be something with the markdown render.

@ullarah@txt.quisquiliae.com works for me! A tricky bitmight be if it splits within a codeblock so markdown can’t parse

@fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com the things Gemini has going for it are mutual TLS and lack of JavaScript. Which makes for a secure albeit boring experience (much like gopher). The fake markdown is a bit of a drag.

A render mode for Gemini probably wouldnt be too hard. There are markdown to Gemini libs out there.

With Web3 the whole trust a 3rd party browser ext + high fees + env impact for compute and storage are serious no gos for me.. I have heard one too many horror stories about clicking the wrong link and some script draining your metamask wallet.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org So.. in the great wisdom of markdown parser.. it only provides the Title and deletes the alt. :D i guess i could write out the alt and title as the same value

@fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com
The signs show fine on jenny. So, it is a display thing. Probably related to Markdown.

Oof! I found a bug on Yarn’s Markdown rendering, @prologic@twtxt.net. See OP.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de, would you know the regex to use within .muttrc to colorise a Markdown code block like the one below?

# This one works for `code`, but that's about it.
(^|[[:space:][:punct:]])\`[^\`]+\`([[:space:][:punct:]]|$)

@eldersnake@yarn.andrewjvpowell.com There isn’t an equivalent for those because:

Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags.

You can read more of its philosophy at Daring Fireball. There are enhancements to Markdown (CommonMark, for example), that add extra to it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de To clarify, Markdown is just text. 😊 I can do bolding, link things, and if single return multilines ever comes to jenny, I would be able to do bulleted and numbered lists.

The only things—that I know of—that doesn’t work is “> “, but I can use “>”, like so:

D’oh!

So, jenny allows me to write Markdown almost just fine!

@quark@ferengi.one If so, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, not quite https://www.uninformativ.de/git/jenny/commit/4a02eeec58317107c07e759733312d168e319f17.html#h0-0-5... Markdown needs single new lines for many things. Bulleted, numbered, code, etc. need them.

Unrelated: my first response shows a rendering bug on your site: it’s dropping a backslash. Hard to mix markdown and genuine plain text.

@prologic@twtxt.net That is strange.. i wonder if there is another change that is causing it. Benchmarks are thinking the other way :|

BenchmarkAll/retwt-16                  1        4940172200 ns/op       587319376 B/op    2587159 allocs/op
BenchmarkAll/lextwt-16                 1         775764020 ns/op         9223088 B/op     197557 allocs/op
BenchmarkParse/retwt-16                1         591158277 ns/op        67539096 B/op     230841 allocs/op
BenchmarkParse/lextwt-16               1         716961837 ns/op         5450448 B/op     130290 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/retwt-html-16          1        8358103017 ns/op       918709168 B/op    4692292 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/lextwt-html-16         1         822033267 ns/op        14280112 B/op     261795 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/retwt-markdown-16      1        8114225415 ns/op       929928384 B/op    4693004 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/lextwt-markdown-16     1         806554306 ns/op        14332608 B/op     270905 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/retwt-text-16          1        8098215897 ns/op       923862192 B/op    4684739 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/lextwt-text-16         1         745064673 ns/op        12689784 B/op     252476 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/retwt-literal-16       1        4068799822 ns/op       409517880 B/op    2372471 allocs/op
BenchmarkOutput/lextwt-literal-16      1         754793627 ns/op         9834520 B/op     214931 allocs/op

@prologic@twtxt.net @hxii@0xff.nu I’m certain that it is a markdown thing. Its that way on other markdown sites like Reddit. Because the underline is being escaped to prevent the underline style. Gotta double it up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@xuu@txt.sour.is @prologic@twtxt.net (#6jkpxzq) hmm from what i can tell its parsing ok.. something got broken in the markdown conversion…

@prologic@twtxt.net yep. it actually extracts everything at parse time. like mentions/tags/links/media. so they can be accessed and manipulated without additional parsing. it can then be output as MarkDown

Honestly never realized before Beakerbrowser that peer-to-peer could be used to share markdown, JavaScript and html files.

/meta @ckipp@chronica.xyz About images, sure, I understand it’s useless for CLI-only use. But if we added our own format, maybe something like Markdown

Image