thanks :)
you expect on initial load for it to be top to bottom filled with news items?
the reason the news flows from the bottom is because this project was inspired by digg labs and thats how theirs was designed
The main point of the essay is that MD files should be supported on an OS level. This way, you could share an MD file with anybody, and it will “just work”.
You could develop your own viewer, but this will not solve the problem of “just working” for every user. Because most users wouldn't install some app just to open the file you shared with them. The same way you don't expect users to install any software to open websites, images or PDFs.
I want any browser to render MD content natively. Imagine just dropping .md files to your server and having a working website.
Of course, there are services that do that for you, ranging from Hugo to Obsidian Publish. But they all add a level of complexity that you have to manage.
Also, this makes user-level styling much simpler. This is what any “Reading mode” does, but without reverse-engineering the content from a soup of tags and classes.
I'm thinking about registering a mirror of my website on .md TLD (Moldova) and serve MD version of my site. This is for users who, like you, have an extension installed, and would prefer to configure the styling themselves. Or for AI agents, I guess.
You'd only get plain unstyled rendering with browser support. And at that level you don't need any complexity from Hugo or Obsidian - you only need a very simple script to convert md to plain html. No config or anything to maintain.
> You'd only get plain unstyled rendering with browser support
What I imagined is browsers rendering the content with headings, quotes, etc. Browsers could have some default styles to render MD files. Those styles could be configurable the same way “Reading mode” is usually configurable.
The plain unstyled rendering of strings of text is, of course, available even now. That's why I'm saying this needs a browser-level support.
> you only need a very simple script to convert md to plain html
I get, that it feels simple compared to other software. Even more, MD was designed specifically to be simple!
But if you think about it, this is still too much complexity to just share some text.
With native browser support, you could run zero commands to build a website.
I think this is mostly important for regular users, not developers. Imagine if creating a Word document would require the same level of complexity as building a web page: I doubt that the format would be so popular as it is nowadays.
> I dislike maintaining side projects. That includes my own code, but also self-hosted services developed by someone else. I’m okay with a few minutes of maintenance here and there, but having to schedule hours of uninterrupted work to upgrade something, or spending any amount of time at all on emergency maintenance, really kills my desire to work with computers.
I've struggled with the same problem, and Coolify helped me with it. It supports auto-deployment from GitHub via a bot integration, so you don't have to manage Github Actions. It can also deploy from a Docker Compose file, which is good for self-hosting other people's projects.
Of course you still have to have a list of instructions on how to set up your server with Coolify. But at least it's a finite set of instructions, meaning you don't have to update it every time you host a new project.
Agree, I quickly ran into broken behaviors with Coolify (e.g. marketplace search filters straight up do nothing) and that didn't inspire trust. Komodo has been solid so far.
But why does it start to fill from an empty screen when opened? Shouldn't the news flow all the time like a river?
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