Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/14/minimalist-web-publishing-plat.html
…
12 Likes
Oh crap, how did I not know this was a thing!
Very cool, for so many reasons.
1 Like
A statement…curiously… seldom uttered by those who actually decided against building it in a weekend; rather than those who technically possess the skill necessary to replicate it, once it’s been pointed out to them.
2 Likes
This is an incredible list, @beschizza! Thanks for the share. Does anyone know of something similar, but maybe locally hosted and one account? I write lots of small stuff constantly, but kind of want it in my control hosted on my own domain. Just a simple way to log in, type, and publish simply.
4 Likes
Kind of like the “static site generators” or simple CMS type stuff, but as dumb as txt.fyi?
Someone has surely made this. I know that some of the simple CMS stuff is very simple indeed.
Single-file CMS:
https://christopher.su/2012/singularity-cms-single-php-file/
Five-file CMS:
(Not tried either, though)
4 Likes
If I was going to bang up something quick, I’d use TiddyWiki over node.js, or a hosting site.
Edit: If you just want static, you can throw a single HTML file up on a site with all the bits.
2 Likes
It seems static pages are becoming more popular what with them being practically unhackable and lighting fast!
As far as my very limited knowledge into this goes Jeckyll seems to be the most popular right now. The setup for this does require a lot more technical chops then a simple PHP/MySQL website though.
If you don’t care about anybody seeing your posts (or don’t mind a hacky solution to lock the entire thing down) you could also use a Etherpad.
I really like the webste and the list @beschizza! Thanks! I will be checking out the single and five file CMS’s too!
2 Likes
Maybe Boing Boing should be published on one of these. If I leave a Boing Boing page open in my browser for more than 10 minutes, it crashes it.
1 Like
Over the past couple of months, I’ve become increasingly aware that I just…do not…care…about what’s being presented as The Internet these days. I’d bought into the whole thing: the platforms, how to use them, how to accumulate numbers that translate first into dopamine hits, then into influence (maybe), and then (supposedly) into something that resembles or supports an income-producing creative endeavor (perhaaaps…ehhhh?). Not that I was particularly good at doing any of those things, mind you. But it’s becoming clear to me that no, it’s not that I’m old and in the way…or not entirely, anyway. The whole game really is a bit vacuous, vapid, and pointless, yet the incessant chorus of voices in the arts and publishing insists otherwise. I’m realizing that I do not, in fact, want to be the sort of person who’s really good at playing it, and I’m tired of being told I have to if I want my work out in the world. There’s got to be something else.
Your snippet: “…strip away…the baroque and falsified quantifiers of social capital littering the web” really resonates.
This is a good day, now.
2 Likes
Something similar (but different…oooh!) but certainly chaotic is https://s3z.me
I don’t think it’s quite worked out what it is yet, but it’s a nice oddity.
Nice. This is nice. I’m sick to death of hunting through an arms length list of scripts i have to enable just to get some basic functionality. No, google analytics, fuck off!
Oh, nice inclusion of hiraeth as well, always loved that word. 
1 Like
Seems only fair to dial the Wayback Machine to 2008 and look at Rael Dornfest’s Blosxom. (Bona fides: Rael was CTO for O’Reilly Media for a while; he also led the RSS-DEV Working Group which produced RSS 1.0; and many more projects.)
Blosxom is 300 lines of Perl that produce a date-sorted blog, either live or static. Super simple CMS – the file system is the database. The base code gives access to plugins at 12 spots during page generation. Plugins are very simple to write, or there are hundreds available from users. Page layout is fully customizable using head, body, and foot templates, and of course CSS.
Blosxom is great for low-volume blogs (after a couple thousand posts the file system tends to creak a bit; -), in-house interactive docs, and simple mockups of more complex projects. It’s also a wonderful tool for learning Perl!
(BTW, nice move Rob – don’t think I’ve ever been rickrolled in text before; -)
2 Likes
Is there source available?
1 Like
Was just about to say: this needs a link to a github repo.
1 Like
It’ll be on github soon!
4 Likes
Excellent idea for a K.I.S.S. formatter, though it might be worth considering recognizing multiple spaces or tabs as non-breakable spaces, and keeping entered newlines as actual newlines.
I put a short excerpt from a novel being discussed in an author group for us to use as a reference into txt.fyi but as it was directly from the book, and used indentation for paragraphs instead of blank lines, it came out as one large blob of text instead of looking the way it did in a text editor.
What on Earth am I talking about?
Text excerpt as entered to txt.fyi.
Text excerpt as formatted by txt.fyi.
Text excerpt as hand formatted.
Great idea, though! Should be very useful.
3 Likes
That’s what I need too. So far seems like Write.as is one of the best on the list at keeping text in it’s original form right now (like yours).
I like Yellow, which seems to work very nicely. Write with Markdown & it’s kind of a refreshing in simplicity in a world where multi megabyte pages have become the norm.
