BLOG.TXT ======== The most minimal blogging platform in the known universe -- or your money back! 2021-10-23 - Blink and you miss it ================================== I believe this is the fastest, lightest blogging platform there is. This entire blog is about 9 kilobytes, uncompressed. That's only ~5 kilobytes over the wire. This entire blog is less than 1/400th the size of an average page. It loads in milliseconds. It saves power, both on the server and on the client, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping to mitigate climate change. 2021-10-22 - Post list chronology ================================= Blog.txt supports multiple options for the chronological order of posts. If you start writing new posts below old posts, the default post sort is descending. If you start writing new posts above all the old posts, like I do, then the post sort algorithm will default to ascending. But if the user would like to change the sort order of the posts, they can press the "End" button on their keyboard to reverse the default chronological order! ADVERTISEMENT: Even plaintext sites can have advertisements. If you want your Ghost blog to looks as ugly as stink, buy my theme: >>> https://creativemarket.com/Curiositry/3192652 <<< 2021-10-22 - Comments ===================== Miss the flame-wars and privacy-annihilating ad-networks of the comments section? Blog.txt has built commenting support, including comment moderation. Email me your comment, and I'll paste it in below the post with less effort than it would take for me to solve the captcha guarding the entrance to the catacombs of my Disqus moderation dashboard. Mum: really cool site. Admin: Thanks! HN user: this site sucks. definitely should have built it in lisp. Admin: Thanks for the feedback! n00b: Is your ghost theme compatible with wordpress? Admin: Unfortunately not :/ n00b: what about the theme this site is running? i relly like it. 2021-10-22 - Paid Memberships ============================= Send me money, and I will email you the rest of this post, which is only available to paying members. "Does that scale?" Of course it does. Who are we kidding: how likely is it that we'll even get enough paying members to pay for hosting a whiz-bang gated-content membership site? t s pssble tht hvnt actlly wrttn th rst f ths pst yt. -------PAYWALL------- Send an international wire transfer to gain access to the vowels! 2021-10-22 - Images =================== You can have any colour of Rolls-Royce, as long as it's black. You can have any kind of image, as long as it's plaintext: |____________________________________________________| | __ __ ____ ___ || ____ ____ _ __ | || |__ |--|_| || |_| |||_|**|*|__|+|+||___| || | | ||==|^^||--| |=||=| |=*=||| |~~|~| |=|=|| | |~||==| | || |##|| | | || | |JRO|||-| | |==|+|+||-|-|~||__| | ||__|__||__|_|_||_|_|___|||_|__|_|__|_|_||_|_|_||__|_| ||_______________________||__________________________| | _____________________ || __ __ _ __ _ | ||=|=|=|=|=|=|=|=|=|=|=| __..\/ | |_| ||#||==| / /| || | | | | | | | | | | |/\ \ \\|++|=| || ||==| / / | ||_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_/_/\_.___\__|_|__||_||__|/_/__| |____________________ /\~()/()~//\ __________________| | __ __ _ _ \_ (_ . _/ _ ___ _____| ||~~|_|..|__| || |_ _ \ //\\ / |=|__|~|~|___| | | | ||--|+|^^|==|1||2| | |__/\ __ /\__| |==|x|x|+|+|=|=|=| ||__|_|__|__|_||_|_| / \ \ / / \_|__|_|_|_|_|_|_|_| |_________________ _/ \/\/\/ \_ _______________| | _____ _ __ |/ \../ \| __ __ ___| ||_____|_| |_|##|_|| | \/ __| ||_|==|_|++|_|-||| ||______||=|#|--| |\ \ o / /| | |~| | | ||| ||______||_|_|__|_|_\ \ o / /_|_|__|_|__|_|_||| |_________ __________\___\____/___/___________ ______| |__ _ / ________ ______ /| _ _ _| |\ \ |=|/ // /| // / / / | / ||%|%|%| | \/\ |*/ .//____//.// /__/__/ (_) / ||=|=|=| __| \/\|/ /(____|/ // / /||~|~|~|__ |___\_/ /________// ________ / / ||_|_|_| |___ / (|________/ |\_______\ / /| |______| / \|________) / / | | 2021-10-22 - Stats ================== There is no way to include intrusive JavaScript tracking codes on a plaintext site. But you can still have analytics: if your server starts heating up, you've definitely been slashdotted. 2021-10-22 - RSS ================ This is perhaps the (one?) area where blog.txt is less awesome than the bloated blogging behemoths: there's is no easy way to support RSS feeds, unless you write it by hand. But you can do that, if you want to be bespoke: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-create-an-rss-feed-for-your-site-from-scratch/ Alternately, you can point users to https://visualping.io for email alerts when you update the blog. Plumb that together with https://kill-the-newsletter.com, and you have a feed in a handful of clicks. Or, they can bake their own with a cronjob that checks the date modified! wget --server-response --spider https://www.curiositry.com/blog.txt 2>&1 | grep -i Last-Modified ...etc. Alternately, GitHub provides commit RSS feeds for repos at https://github.com/:user/:repo/commits.atom. Feed are also available for releases. If you're using GitHub pages for hosting, you can point your users to the feed. If your blog.txt is part of a larger repo, no big deal: most feed readers support filtering, and IFTTT can help those that don't. Postscript: there's one other thing that blog.txt (probably) sucks at: SEO. But SEO is a cesspit, so I'm not going to talk about it, other than to say good riddance; the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. (On the other hand, blog.txt is perfectly optimized for nifty small- and slow-web search engines such as https://search.marginalia.nu/ and https://wiby.me/) 2021-10-22 - What is a blog? ============================ #sourdough It's a website with a collection of things that you've written. The basic features are the ability to create, delete, and edit blog posts. A plaintext file has all those features built in. I'll talk about following a blog.txt in the next post. 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. 2021-10-22 - #Tags ================== #feature Now, one of the first things any reasonable user wants from a weblog is some kind of organization. Most writers are interested in a number of topics, especially on a personal blog. However, readers are often interested in someone's thoughts on technology, but not their obsession with sourdough. Take a look at the top of this post. That's a tag up there. Now, you can hit "/" (or CTRL+F), and search for posts tagged "#feature". Hit enter, and it will jump to the next use of the tag, skipping over all the sourdough! 2021-10-22 - In the beginning... ================================ Curiositry said, "Let there be simplicity." And there was simplicity. What the heck is blog.txt? Glad you asked! Blog.txt is an experiment in constraints. The idea occurred to me on a sleepless night. I was thinking about author's websites, and how the websites of my favourite authors are often horribly out of date -- even the "Now" pages haven't been updated in years. Perhaps, I thought, it's because websites have gotten more complicated than necessary. And then I thought: what is really needed for a blog? Text. That's it. Plaintext is the one thing that a blog needs. What if a blog was just a text file? That would mean ... no updates, no security problems, no janky formatting, no fussing with fonts, no searching for stock photos, no forgotten passwords, no cookie consent banners, no outages... So I decided to try to take the blogging platform back to essentials, to its most absurdly basic form, and see how many of the features that we know and love could be retained in a blogging platform that didn't even exist. 2021-10-21 - Hello, World ========================= This is the first post on a cutting-edge weblog platform that took me only 5 minutes to build from scratch, including writing this post & deploying. --------------------------- Made by hand by @curiositry