senders.io - My Markdown -> HTML Setup

My Markdown -> HTML Setup

A common way I see a lot of people blog, especially micro-blog, is in + markdown.

+
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted + text using a plain-text editor.
+

+ +

It built itself on-top of common syntax prevalent on the web and was + designed to be converted into simple HTML output. Since it leveraged + preexisting syntax it was easy for new users to pick up, and is now found + all over the web and applications.

Since I started this website, I had been writing each page by hand + using a few tools to facilitate that - and for a while I had been looking + for a good way to try out using markdown to generate some lighter pages + and these blogposts.

Writing HTML by hand

When it comes to blogging a lot of platforms offer WYSIWYG editor – + allowing users to write in rich-text that then gets converted into HTML + in the style of the platform. But for my case, since I self host this + website, I decided to stick to my roots and write PURE HTML instead.

HTML is fairly simple and easy once you get use to the basic structure + of the system. And since I’ve been working in HTML almost two decades + now, at the time it felt like the best solution to make a clean + website.

I briefly touched on my design process in 2019-01-21 - First! A New Years Resolution + outlining that I wanted to make a very lightweight and simple website. + And at the time I believed the best way to achieve this goal was to + carefully structure and craft my website’s HTML by hand.

This article is making the process sound far more difficult than it is + – it’s mostly just tedious.

<article>
+<h2> Title </h2>
+<p>
+   Some paragraph....
+</p>
+<h3>
+<p> some subsection </p>
+</h3>
+<p> more text </p>
+... etc
+

Is essentially what the website looks like - you can view the source + of this page to see – it’s very simple HTML.

The benefit I found doing this, mostly leveraging tidy, allowed a very easy to edit codebase. And + by leveraging the existing tags and their properties I also attempted to + keep the styling to an absolute minimum. Using existing tags to enforce + the styling I desired.

Only for certain areas (tables, code, quotes) where readability is an + issue do I setup custom CSS.

Most of this process is actually what will continue to happen but the + actual writing process will be unobstructed by the tedium of writing + HTML.

Micro-blogging in general

At the time of writing this, I have no ported over any of my Gemini micro-blogs. This + warrants a longer post, since I wrote consistently in gemini from + March 2021 through May 2021 – having only stopped due to a long move + leading to a lot of server downtime breaking the habit. My gemini + updated multiple days a week - mostly due to the extremely lightweight + and limited nature of the platform.

Gemtext

Gemtext + was the gemini protocol’s standard MIME type. It was a basic markup + language that relied on line based syntax. It was purposefully as lean + as necessary because this was what was ACTUALLY being served to + clients – unlike Markdown which first needed to be converted to HTML, + gemtext was the actual text served and rendered on the viewers client. + You could customize the style of your client - but you could not, as + an author, dictate how your content would be viewed. This meant the + only aspects of your blog you had control over was the actual content + and it’s structure – which for a blog is really all you should care + about.

It’s syntax contained most of what I was actually using here already + from HTML:

headings
paragraphs that were wrapped based on page-width
links
lists
quotes
preformatted-text / codeblocks

Besides links - it also leveraged the same common syntaxes that + markdown did.

Gemtext links

From my brief time in the IRC and in geminispace in general - a lot of + the “recommendations” came from new users about providing in-line links. + The philosophy was that by forcing links to exist on their own line - + clients could configure how they wanted these to be seen and not have to + worry about links interfering with the text.

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Like Gopher (and unlike Markdown or HTML), Gemtext only lets you + put links to other documents on a line of their own. You can’t make a + single word in the middle of a sentence into a link. This takes a + little getting used to, but it means that links are extremely easy to + find, and clients can style them differently (e.g. to make it clear + which protocol they use, or to display the domain name to help users + decide whether they want to follow them or not) without interfering + with the readability of your actual textual content.
+

+ — gemini.circumlunar.space + – A quite introduction to “gemtext” markup | Links +

+ +

I felt that this provided a lot of useful limitations that removed a + huge barrier for me to actually write down ideas without feeling over + burdened. I also lurked in the IRC - as well as implemented my + own gemini server.

As a quick aside – the java server was a lot of fun! The protocol was + very simple to work with for basic gemtext. I felt the ultimate downside + was trying to build something for basic gemini capsule hosting (like I + was using for a decent chunk of my time with gemini) - and something for + developers to use as a base application server. At the time in 2021 a lot + of talk was happening on IRC of users starting to look to provide more + complex experiences via the protocol and I wanted a way for those + interactions to be built out in Java - since most were in Go or Python at + the time. This decision lead to me burning out due to difficulties + splitting those responsiblities easily - where you could host along side + your application - since I lacked the experience with more complex Gemini + capsule applications.

But it was a good experience and I got hands on experience with Certs, + Netty, and SNI - which actually came in handy at my job!

Wasn’t this about Markdown?

A lot of what I liked about Gemini I found missing when I returned to + the World Wide Web. Writing a new post was tedious and I actually had a + few drafts sitting unposted. They’re probably checked into my git at this + moment! So I thought - why not just use markdown and convert to HTML? + That’s what it’s built for - and I already designed my site to work with + minimal customization of raw HTML tags!

How I use Markdown

Firstly, this blogpost was written in Markdown (with minimal HTML + sprinkled in). Then I render the markdown into HTML using Discount. + Frankly, I don’t know how I stumbled across this markdown parser - I + think it came pre-installed on my KDE Arch system because another KDE + program used it. But I liked it, and it seemed extensible enough for + my needs.

This would produce the “body” of my articles - and I could then + prepend and append the template-head and foot to my html output to form a + blog post/web page.

Customizations

After I generated the output file, I replaced some placeholders in the + templates via sed and then tidy’d the HTML. The + only other major issue was Discount had no way of appending any link + attributes – so for external links I had sed append the + rel and target attributes - which work off the + assumption they’re not there. A lot of my home-server scripts rely on + assumptions…

This is all bundled up in a simple script file so I can just supply a + few arguments and the full page is re-rendered on command.

Two Sources of Truth

In the sytem I devised the markdown files are really the “source of + truth” but you could argue that the HTML files hold equal weigh - as + they’re what you’re reading right now. The markdown is only useful if I + render it as HTML. There exist nginx extensions to serve markdown as HTML + so I store everything as markdown. I could also provide some heading + information to the markdowns to remove the command arguments and have on + boot it generate the .html files in place before launching the site… But + these are all nice ideas for a later date.

Ultimately, this is something I contribute to ocassionally - I don’t + need something too complicated. I just need to output some HTML a few + times a year. So if I manually publish the HTML each time - that’s likely + far more efficent then re-rendering.

Learnings

This is the first post that uses this - though I’ve converted a page + over to this already. But once I worked out the kinks and built a flow + that works for me - this made the writing process a LOT easier. Another + issue was that once I tidy’d the HTML file - it became + frustrating to edit, and I didn’t always re-tidy it. Because the output + is always tidy’d by the script - I can edit the raw markdown + as needed. And the script generally will always output the same file + (with whatever changes I made of course). This makes the editing and git + history a lot clearer.

I would recommend writing in markdown - or even trying out gemini - + you can host your gemini capsule on the web even! (Most gemini webpages + are gemini capsules converted). I am sure other “blog focused markups” + also exist too.