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I have a Markdownish static site

2025-09-03 20:15:02.009541+02 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

I have a Markdown-ish static site generator that has heritage to code I wrote in 1998 to convert email to web sites, I use Emacs for text editing, and I'm playing with Obsidian, and wondering what people do about paragraph breaks vs line breaks.

Lots of <br/> is funky, and yet...

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: I have a Markdownish static site made: 2025-09-04 00:37:15.650263+02 by: spc476 [edit history]

I have my own markup language I've been using for a few years now. For normal, non-PRE text, I gather all the lines until a blank line and format that within <P> tags. If I want a line break within such a paragraph, I'll add a “ /” (space, slash) at the end of the line, which is translated into a <BR>.

I will say, my markup language is a mishmash of Markdown, TeX and Org-mode, plus some made up syntax for links. I think I need to add a file for the output though …

#Comment Re: I have a Markdownish static site made: 2025-09-05 00:58:53.675301+02 by: Dan Lyke

Oooh, I like the "/" as a newline marker. That might be the direction I go.

#Comment Re: I have a Markdownish static site made: 2025-09-06 01:28:30.111068+02 by: spc476

One reason I wrote my own is that I don't like any of the Markdown languages. Also, since I store my blog entries as HTML, I'm free to experiment with the syntax of my markup language without worry of breaking old entries.

#Comment Re: I have a Markdownish static site made: 2025-09-08 19:00:43.418848+02 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, I know I considered storing a pre-rendered version at some point, don't remember if I did that. But 100% with you on the "don't like any of the...", my own variant has evolved from the thing I wrote in late '97/early '98, and I'm now adding some of the now standard headings and such to the formatting in the C++ version, and gradually converging (I did some stuff explicitly for Obsidian compatibility, for instance), it's still hard to merge.

Especially since I'm still fumbling about with image inclusion syntax (borrowed mostly from Wikipedia).

#Comment Re: I have a Markdownish static site made: 2025-09-09 01:53:43.588723+02 by: spc476

I finally got something I like for photos:

#+photo
test.jpg
        alt=A small picture of ... something
        title=This is a test [] of the ``image'' stuff with a really long text message to see if I can deal with this stuff.
test.png        test.gif
        alt=Another small picture of ... something
        title=This is yet another → test of the stuff
#-photo

It sets the photo off in its own <DIV>, and it will open the appropriate file to get the dimensions automagically. The first example (test.jpg) is just a photo; the second one uses test.gif as a link to test.png. This works for me since I rarely, if ever, inline images with text.

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(If anyone ever actually uses Webmention/indie-action to post here, please email me)




Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

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