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I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten
wraith808:
My dream is that something like markdown text files can be used to create live websites, similar to what andy matsuchack has going on in his blog that he won't share with anyone.
-superboyac (July 12, 2020, 04:40 PM)
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This is already a reality.
I currently use it on my site with Pico. There's also Postachio which does the same with files in Evernote, and Jekyll. I'm sure there are others, but those three have distinct differences so I posted those (and they're the ones I've used- go figure).
Pico generates the files on the fly. I upload Markdown, and it stays as Markdown. It's just rendered in the browser.
Postachio grabs the Markdown files from an Evernote folder. I suppose for all intents and purposes, since it's Markdown in Evernote, it does the same as Pico, other than the fact that your Markdown notes are in Evernote.
Jekyll is a static site generator. You run it, it generates the site in a folder that you upload as is to your site.
I personally settled on Pico as I don't have to generate the site, and I have the plain files as text files that I can do whatever I want with, and the source is on the server.
superboyac:
Pico generates the files on the fly. I upload Markdown, and it stays as Markdown. It's just rendered in the browser.
-wraith808 (July 12, 2020, 08:29 PM)
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PICO FOR THE WIN!! awesome...i swear i searched for hours sheesh
Dormouse:
I find Markdown attractive for writing on the computer. The guy has good points.
Part of the attraction is that developers have been trying to use markdown to create nice gui's for writing, like zettlr. It's very satisfying to see all the colors and headings change by putting the pound or asterisk symbol, etc.
It's nice that a lot of people have latched on to the format, and we all feel we can use these text files to get around in life. I think part of this guy's comments doesn't appreciate the aesthetics of the writing community.
But again, on a technical level, he has points...and I have struggled very much with the conversion of documents.
-superboyac (July 12, 2020, 04:40 PM)
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I think he's writing out of long experience and frustration.
And he's right in that markdown was devised for techies - programmers and web writers of the day. Thats why code blocks have a degree of precedence. And it doesn't have many features, like colour, that some writers use: random acceptance of different HTML is frustrating. As is random acceptance of bits from other languages like YAML. It's like a bicycle invented by a carpenter, the idea is good but it's stuffed with issues that many feel they can solve with a bit of bodging; and competing carpenters conventions which decide which bodges should be used more widely.
And all the previews and wysiwygs depend on a conversion to HTML, which conversion is inconsistent, as he points out.
Most of the time it doesn't matter to me. I'm usually quite happy with text. But it depends what I'm doing. I'm used to using multi colour highlighting when I'm editing or reviewing, but colour use is reserved for syntax in a text editor (otherwise they'd compete). I'm used to sophisticated tables in some areas of writing; there are some fairly easy primitive editors, like Typora, but generally much easier to produce tables in a word processor.
Dormouse:
plain text files --> good looking website
-superboyac (July 12, 2020, 04:40 PM)
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Markdown should certainly be good at this. It's part of what it was designed for and most websites accept markdown. PICO looks like a reasonable option for designing a website purely for your own documents, though there's a lot of techie type setting up. Obsidian will be adding it as a (paid) option in the next few months, but I think it will need to be simpler for many users (many Obsidian users appear to be programmers, IT students or techie other - but many are at the other end of the techie spectrum).
wraith808:
PICO looks like a reasonable option for designing a website purely for your own documents
-Dormouse (July 13, 2020, 05:24 AM)
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Why do you say 'purely for your own documents'?
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