Posts and comments

Publishing content is very easy - github, blogger, personal pages, countless social sites and fancy P2P networks. 

Reading content is harder - Reddit, Twitter, Feedly and few others are attempting to identify 'interesting' content and organize it. There is too much content published, and too little diversity if you stick with a list of subscriptions (old style blog readers) and too much garbage and propaganda if you want broader sources. 

Comments are the third problem - they usually are more interesting than the original post, and are valuable both to the reader and to the original poster.  Just posting some content on a page with no way to get any feedback is a waste of time.

I've started to look for an alternative to Twitter for reading - and while doing so I also started for a place to start posting/blogging/ranting. I rarely post on Twitter - but I keep a lot of notes on various projects and experiments - just too lazy to publish them except in comments and 'readme' in git repos I work on.

The options so far:

• blogger - I've been using it for a very long time, easy - but very unfriendly to code and markdown.
• reddit - for posting in specific topics. Great comments and community associated with the topic. I've seen many posting a 'blog' or page on github and linking it to reddit for discussions/comments.
• https://github.com/utterance/utterances - comments become github issues. Interesting idea - using search in the issue tracker to hold the post comments. Best associated with blogs hosted on github.
• disqus - adds on the free edition, $11 for add free. Work to set it up.
• cusdis - open source, selfhosted option - supports sqlite.
• ...

For now I'm (re)starting to use blogger - it is by far the least effort, since my goal is to publish my tech notes and rants and maybe get a bit of feedback if anyone stumbles on them - but also checking Reddit. I wouldn't spam Reddit with my rants - but most communities seem high quality and the moderation on each community seems like a far better way to keep the noise out than even old Twitter (very low bar, but that's what I used to use to read, when I somehow trusted they have a team fighting against garbage content and disinformation). 

If I get bored - I would try 'utterances' with github and cusdis.

Test stackedit

Evaluating Stackedit

I am looking for an open source a markdown editor running in a browser, for chrome/android.

Stackedit use nodejs at least for some features, but appears it can work offline. It can sync the local browser storage with Google Drive or a private CouchDB or Dropbox. It can publish to Blogger and github among other things - but no Gogs. Blogger support is interesting - I stopped using blogger in large part because of the editor, I write most of my notes in markdown in a private git repository, didn’t bother with setting up a convert/publish system - having it integrated may motivate me to cleanup and publish other random notes.

A docker image is provided that can run on a private domain, nodejs based. Seems to have some collaborative editing if using a CouchDB, including support for private CouchDB when using stackedit.io.

Seems to support frontmatter and a comments system - the comments get saved in a HTML comment, at the end of the document as “se_discussion_list:JSON”, containing ‘selectionStart/selectionEnd/comment[]’. Presumably this is integrated in the couch DB support and synced, but didn’t test it yet.

On google drive: the permissions allow it to add new documents to drive, create or open documents explicitly from drive - but it can’t see or access any other file. I assume dropbox is similar. Also seems to have a way to publish via ssh - so some random hosting site like dreamhost.

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It can import/export local disk - but one file a time. Shouldn’t be a problem if files are saved to Drive, but still need to be opened in Stackedit one by one.

Table	Supported
No	auto-indent

So far I haven’t found a good markdown editor except Emacs orgmode that is good with tables.

For editing-in-chrome I also found Drive Notepad. Both Drive Notepad and Stackedit are based on ace.js - but Stackedit has more integrations with external storage, while Notepad only support Drive, and is much simpler/cleaner as a result. On the other side, Notepad supports most programming languages - as long as the source is stored in google drive.

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First problem with mail blogs

I was parsing the Cafe Con Leche rss feed. No explicit date - that becomes ususal. Only the day can be extracted from the link reference. The real problem - only "description" is available for items,

with a short exceprt - and the link points to the day view, not the individual item.



Initially I was thinking to use a workaround for "description only" or "incomplete content" - i.e. grab the linked item. Unfortunately the link is not to the article, but to the page containing a list of articles and a lot of other markup and stuff.