 Hello and welcome to episode session three of Open Publishing Ecosystem, the flex course that we are so excited about to dig into the next tool here with the next person. So that's Paul Hibbits and we're going to be talking about Docsify this. And yeah, I'm really excited. So Paul, can you kind of introduce yourself first and then we'll talk about tools and stuff? Sure. Thanks very much, Taylor and thank Amanda. So my name is Paul Hibbits and I am a kind of educator slash interaction designer slash kind of more recent open source author from Vancouver, Canada, or speaking to you from Vancouver, Canada. And I have gotten into open source more recently and kind of as a way to expand what I could do for my students. I teach I taught a user interface design course for many years at Southern Fraser University in Burnaby. And I kind of got into open source as a way to kind of extend our LMS which is Canvas and got into open education in general and open publishing. And so yeah, so that's a little bit I guess about me. That's awesome. Thanks for introducing yourself a little bit here. And we wanted to bring you in to talk about your work specifically with Docsify this. And up till now we've talked about in this flux course we've talked a little bit about HedgeDoc which is a nice tool for authoring markdown files collaboratively. And we've talked about manifold which does all kinds of things and is like a whole institutional repository or journal. You could use it for those things. Docsify this, I think my favorite thing about it is how different it is in terms of maybe use case but possibly almost as important technologically. It's a somewhat self-contained simple tool and the baseline of it is for publishing markdown files online. What do you think Docsify this is good for and why should one use it or look at it? Sure. Just stepping back a little bit. Docsify this is really about my third open source project all revolving around markdown publishing. I discovered markdown myself in maybe 2015, 2016. And I really liked the format as a way to provide content in a very exchangeable manner. And so first I was using the graph CMS and I was using that as a way to get markdown content within my LMS again canvas to kind of extend and improve the student experience really of that. And you know takes about 10 minutes to get like a graph you know a server install going and there's a lot of technical knowledge you have to have. And then I discovered Docsify around 2020 or so. And it's a very unique tool. Docsify allows someone to go from a markdown file to a web page without any build process. It's very unique in that way. Many other tools allow you to go from markdown to web pages with a build process. But Docsify is rare in that it does not require that. So I started working in Docsify and created a couple of starter kits to help other educators and open publishers use that system. And I got that down to about 30 seconds where you could go on GitHub as long as you had a GitHub account. You could clone or fork a starter kit that I pre-populated with some demo content, set up GitHub pages and get that going. But I still discovered that you know even that is a barrier to use for a lot of educators and open publishers. And my goal is not to produce the best markdown publishing system in the world. My goal is to produce the easiest way to get into markdown publishing. And once your needs go beyond Docsify this, hey there's a world of markdown publishing tools you can move to. And maybe what you want to do is within Docsify this, which is awesome. So Docsify this, the goal is almost instantaneously or within seconds. Go from a markdown file that's online to a shareable web page that you can embed, that you can visually style, that you can add various elements to, even like enabling hypotheses, using a sidebar, table of contents. So some basic kind of ways to modify that. And that's really you know a little bit of the background story and where we're at and how I see the tool. Again it's hopefully the fastest way out there to get going with markdown publishing and then see what you can do with it. I love that. And I think that what I'm hearing you say and it's just kind of validating what I already like myself about Docsify this, which is that it's very late wait. It's it's meant like you're saying to get people in the door and if they outgrow it and go into bigger in different areas that are more complex and need more complex resources and platforms then that's kind of like yay it did its job because it got people comfortable here without being that huge leap that they need to get into open publishing. Yeah exactly yeah awesome yeah. I also like you know where you're kind of putting the I won't call say boundaries maybe setting expectations or what you see the tool as and where you see its best place is in the whole you know like the least complicated and simplest website to I don't know I don't know what the most complicated website is but I'm sure there is there has to be one right and so is to say if you want to do something with markdown and you want a web page this is gotta be the fastest and easiest way to start at least that I've seen and you know but there there will be a point where you may want to graduate and say you know what I need more than this can do and we'll obviously we'll talk we'll show kind of how the tool works and we'll probably run into some of those uh hey can I customize this well you could you know kind of situations but I I personally I really like viewing tools in that way because it's so easy to say this thing will do everything it's like well if it does everything is it that simple to use is it complicated I think I think doxify really doxify this is really great at this one end of the spectrum now I'm flipped because the way cameras work but uh you know it's on the really easy side and but you can do a surprising amount with it you know like as we'll see here there's there's quite a bit of customization um one thing I wanted to kind of ask about um before we kind of move on is you mentioned a build process um so when you're talking about markdown publishing in grav that requires you know like php and hosting for php it doesn't require a database um and so it's relatively simple to get set up but as you said it's not nothing of course um uh and I I know there are a lot of tools that can take a uh you know you can make a blog with markdown files say and lay it out what do you mean when you say no build process what is um for like a non developer well I guess there's there's two main aspects of that the biggest aspect is there's no build process to go from markdown to servable html pages doxify using nikon that it's a front end javascript processor that goes through and changes in the browser a markdown file into a responsive web page so there's no build process that's required to be run by either like a github action or manually or other ways to translate markdown files into html files which are then servable on the web yeah so that's the main thing but the second really cool thing is is that the tool itself is also no build for instance you can run your own doxify this instance without needing to build a process to do that you literally copy the files or fork the instance of doxify this on the on github and you can be running your own doxify this instance with no build process cool that's also quite powerful because it lowers the entry can you imagine getting someone to run or install their own jekyll instance to do the same thing it's not trivial I literally have and it's not trivial yes um but you can do that with doxify this so no build is content no build process but even doxify this itself is no build process yeah and that does greatly expand the flexibility like like you said you can copy the files and host it literally anywhere that web hosting works right github pages will work to host it you can throw the files in a reclaim hosting shared cpanel account shared hosting account domain of one's own um if if you have a web server this can serve it basically for sure cool all right well so should we dig into the tool you want to kind of show how it works that sounds great so uh why don't we take a look here and I've got lots of things that we can explore so uh you folks can kind of guide me with what you want to see I'll give you a brief kind of review of what I've got prepared I've got some materials to give you an overview of doxify this I've got some examples that we can look at I provide a set of templates to help people get going right away with using doxify this to present markdown and I've also got a little bit about using hedge doc with doxify this and a little background material about doxify itself that's of interest so you let me know where you'd like me to kind of start we can kind of take it from there cool I always like to start I think starting with the example starting with the hey I've got this and let's do this with it so if maybe you want to show us like we'll grab a markdown file and put it in doxify this and see what it looks like if we start with that sure sure so let's start off with just a very simple markdown file so what I've got here is I've got a markdown file on github now again as long as your markdown file is accessible somehow on the web you can use it with doxify this but it has a lot of built-in extra support if you will for if you host on github or codeburg I'll show you that extra support in just a moment so all you need to do let's say we've got this markdown file on github and we want to publish that make it a shareable web page we copy the url of the file we'll then go back over to our doxify this app and right here this is doxify this you can see basically it's a field that you put a url of a markdown file in so I'll do that so I just pasted that and then we have a button called publish as standalone web page I can tap that and here we go we have a responsive web page also including a mermaid diagram which doxify the supports also supporting latex which is mathematical notation so these are things that are fairly standard in markdown to be supported these days like with github let's say and codeburg and they're also supported in doxify this but you know so we got a web page but you know what could we do with it well for instance we can add a table of contents on the right hand side now regenerate the page and now you see a little table of contents on the right hand side I can tap on one of those items and I'll scroll to that link that area of the page I can go back to my doxify this web page builder I can choose a standard doxify sidebar a little bit more substantial navigational tool that supports multiple headers and things like that that you could do and lastly I mentioned like extra support for github and codeburg what do I mean so you have this little checkbox and that will automatically include an edit this page link so let's say you want to go beyond just presenting markdown let's say you want to make it so you invite collaboration with others in your github or codeburg repository of your content you can checkmark that option build your standalone page and then if you scroll down for instance you'll see an edit this page link tap on that link and you'll go directly to the markdown file on github or you could then or can make an edit and suggest changes and things like that so that is really a quick tour of the tool at one thing I should highlight is that when you generate a page what's actually happening is a url is created and this url we can talk more about it later if you want but basically this url says to doxify this hey render this markdown file and you give it the path to the file and the file name and then it can pass options like here you see including the sidebar sidebar equals true so doxify this is again quite unique in that there's two interfaces to style your web pages one interface is the point and click interface the web page builder you could just use that never think about url just you know use the web page builder copy and paste the final url but interestingly the url itself is also a way to modify a web page so let's say I wanted to change from a sidebar presentation to a table of contents I could put table of contents equals true refresh page and now you can see that so the value of this approach is that every time you include that url maybe in like an iframe you can change the presentation of the content to perfectly match the destination platform creating an standalone site with doxify this again you can set up those parameters or with the web page builder to style the page that's best suited for that so that's something that's always I think valuable to highlight to folks about these two ways to style pages yeah and that's it's it's so cool um you know when when when the three of us actually we're talking kind of about you know this course a little bit before while we were kind of saying hey would you be able to help us out uh Paul we're kind of talking about the power of understanding what a url is and what it can do and I just love the idea and I guess I guess isn't really completely unique to doxify this but it is if you know if if uh if all allow me to be really nerdy and excited about the tech specifically here for a second and not just what it can do it's the the entirety you know all of the options are saved in the url right like all of that configuration is there which is um fascinating honestly to me like um that that is even possible to do I guess but the advantage being is you know like you're saying before there's no build process for for any of this that's in part because we can tell the browser what we want it to do based on the url that you've set up and based on the the tool the how it's interpreting that but um so I guess some some some kind of maybe silly questions so you've you've got uh something published in this way this is a file a url you can share with anyone right like it's our it's public right um what else where where else can you go with that like I mean what is it what what kind we're from there I know you've done work with canvas and things like that what do you like to do with these doxify this urls sure sure so uh yeah that that's a great segue to looking at some more uh example um and so again because of the way that you can style your content at the level of the url it means that any tool that accepts a url you can include doxify this content and you can style it so let's take a look at what that might look like you you mentioned canvas I mean definitely a lot of the roots of this tool come from my goal of wanting to extend and improve the student experience within an lms like canvas so let's quickly take a look at that um let's look at this first kind of set the stage what is this this is actually an entire website created with doxify this because with doxify this you can utilize all the features that doxify comes with like adding a top level nav bar adding a very interactive left-handed sidebar and by pointing doxify this to a collection of markdown files you can build an entire website so i'm just going to quickly kind of go through this you know we have a schedule page we have a topics page I can click on one of these topics and go to one of the internal um weekly materials pages uh where i'm using iframes and content from various places to include so this is really a standalone website using doxify this but we were talking about canvas weren't we well this is the thing you can reuse the exact thing content in different context so while this is a website this is a canvas core and this canvas course uses doxify this to include the same content so looking at the home page I'm hoping you see oh that that looks familiar we were just looking at something like that indeed that is true if we go to the schedule page this is indeed the same content but because of URL magic and things like that I can set the font to match the standard canvas font I can set the link color to match the link color of my canvas and spell to make it look like for the students but in fact they don't know any of this right it's just like hopefully they think this is a great canvas site and you know what that would be the greatest compliment for me to hear um because they don't need to know anything about doxify this but if we go to a page like resources and we scroll down you can do things like this you could include if you want your students and they're technically comfortable it was something like github and my computing science students are for instance you could even include a link to go to the repository page with that content so now you see we're serving github-based content seamlessly within canvas and all the instructor needs to do it's it's not nothing but all they need to do is they need to include an iframe or a url of doxify this so yes it is an extra step but there's no easier way really to include external content uh then markdown based content anyway then as I've just described with doxify there so that's an example of using uh canvas with doxify this uh another uh would you like me to show another example Taylor or pause there I don't know Amanda if you have anything right now um before I was I was going to kind of ask like how how simple would this be how straightforward would it be for an instructor to route this through their canvas or their lms but like you're saying it's really in an iframe type situation which is as simple as it probably can get and I just think it's so cool one of the things that I really like here specifically with with the example of using it in an lms is this came up a lot for me when I was working in higher ed and and also doing domain of one's own stuff and we had faculty who were like hey I want to publish this part or all of my course content in the open but also I get feedback from students that says I'm confused by where the course lives on the internet basically they didn't ask it in that way that's a really tailored way of framing that question but but it's or a thing but to say like you know I don't know where to go for my course stuff there's some things in Moodle there's some things over here the syllabus is over here and my advice at the time was like well you know use link to everything from Moodle right like have even if you have nothing else there have a link to your course website and your syllabus and important stuff there so that people so it's your students have a place to do it this allows a really easy way to go one whole step further which is you could literally have it in both formats in both places if you wanted it to right like you could yeah you could author it mark down embed it directly wherever you want your students to be and then also embed it you know on a website to say like hey this is my course on this if anyone wants to look at it and of course it's on github so you can now fork it too right so I think it's even it just kind of in a really natural way I think lends itself to that kind of use of reuse and really seamless updating too that's another one where it's like okay what if I want the same thing in two places and I need to update it well if it's embedded from one place problem solved so mm-hmm yes for sure and also looping back to Amanda's comment you know what the instructor is doing to do that is you know using an iframe that's one way but also a lot of the LMS is now like Moodle and Canvas they have something called like an external link tool where you can actually for one of your items in the main LMS nav area like in Canvas is on the left hand side you can actually include a URL for a menu item and that will automatically be embedded so it's even a little bit easier than an iframe because an iframe is still you know html tags and stuff like that but both Moodle and Canvas and I can't speak to other LMS is they often just have like a tool where you just enter the URL and it will actually provide you know the functionality of that iframe for you which is even better and then to your comment there Taylor indeed using docsify this allows you to display in different ways the same content in different locations and at the same time providing you with a much faster publishing experience like to edit a web page in Moodle or Canvas it's not a fast process usually usually there's multiple steps you need to go to and depending on how comfortable the instructor or the publisher is with something like Github and being able to like sync their content to their desktop you can actually start editing all your course content on your desktop by spending a minute or two kind of setting that process up a little bit beyond probably what we're talking about today but it's all possible. I'd actually like to show you another example of this idea of using content in different ways in different locations. I'd like to see if we can look at an open source project by Alan Levine called TrueWriter and TrueWriter is a it's like a WordPress theme that is really set up for helping students use WordPress as a publishing tool and you can see here this is Alan so he goes by the nickname Cogdog of course documentation on Github. Now Alan was interested in having that documentation available in WordPress and what he was doing previously was he was manually kind of taking this chunk of content and reforming the content so it's presentable in WordPress but that's a manual process right but now Alan is using Docsify this where he's taking that same documentation and hopefully this is going to work and using Docsify this to display that content within WordPress admin so here we have the TrueWriter options page and Alan has added this tag called documentation and the tab and tapping on this presents his documentation and this is the same readme file from that Github repository but it's using Docsify this to present that content and to match that content within WordPress so that's another pardon me that's another great example of using Docsify this to repurpose represent the same content in multiple contexts and I think that's a brilliant example especially if anyone this won't be the most relatable example in terms of what I'm how I'm going to describe it but here we go like if before he wanted to have documentation in a tab like that as part of his theme and he wanted to update the documentation the only way for people to see it would be for them to update the theme like that he would have to make the change in his theme and then update the theme or people would have to update the theme and then they would see the latest set of documentation and this a completely eliminates the need for him to manually you know ship text around but b you know he could even do things like if there was a particularly frequently asked question and it didn't require like a fix or anything to the theme you just throw that near the top and say hey I get this question a lot and here's how to deal with it and he doesn't have to worry about like oh the only people who see my new message is the people who've updated to the latest version or whatever you know yep yep it's very true it allows it it lowers the barrier of of updating and making content the most uh well recent right as you describe uh because it's seamless it just will be there for the next time they view the same content awesome um yeah so I think that that's probably you know a good second example uh of of reusing content in different places again all using docs by this awesome so uh what do you what do you want to cover next what do you think makes most sense for Amanda or for me oh I sorry for you Paul I mean what uh oh okay uh let's see um maybe we should talk a little bit about actually let's go back and look at what we can do to help people get going with docs by this how does that sound sure okay um so of course we know that docs by this uses markdown and again if you want to use markdown and you find value in using markdown then then this tool is something that could help you further that right um but you know it can still be kind of daunting uh to to kind of get an idea first of all what docs by this can do with markdown and also getting going with markdown you know maybe a blank document might not be the best thing for some people maybe it's having some example content and kind of rework it into their own thing so uh the idea here is that with docs by this in addition to the app itself there are various templates that uh can be forked or cloned or downloaded and uploaded or however you want to call it um to help people get going so for instance let's take a look at this little template this is a one page uh template that shows lots of examples of like images and content and different ways that markdown can be used to mark up that content and stylize it and so basically as long as you copy or clone or fork this repository and then having this file you can then start it to be kind of like your own starter point if you will for your own docs by this uh work so for instance what we can do is we can literally we'll just take that url uh and we'll uh open up docsify this again we'll open docify this here and you can see here that this is uh it's a pretty long document but if this gives someone a good example of all the formatting and styling they can do with markdown and again we can go back to docify this we can add a sidebar then we get the navigation oh this is a good point here it's a very long document right there's actually a lot of header level twos and threes to kind of make navigating this long document easier but you notice that the sidebar right now is only showing header one and header twos we can go back to our docsify this interface show more page appearance options and set a higher number to be included in headers in your sidebar so i just put that to three i'll republish the page and now you can see oh okay so under introduction now i've got this nice kind of list of these sub topics if you will and i can more quickly navigate so again this is just a sample to help someone get going it's pretty generic and it uses the content to kind of at the same time show people what they can do with um markdown but of course uh we have some other templates available uh another popular one would be the uh one page site template this is actually on codberg so codberg is an open source alternative to github um some people might not be comfortable let's say with putting their content on github perhaps codberg is open source uh and uh has for some people a more welcoming kind of the area to share their content docify this works totally with codberg files too this is a one page course template so in other words idea of this one page you could provide the materials for you know a short four week course or 12 13 week course to your students um we'll copy that url we'll go over to our docsify this um uh oops you go over to our docs for this instance we'll paste that url publish this standalone web page here's my one page course uh template but you know what would really help here is adding a little table of contents on the side there here we go perfect so now we see what's happening this week we have our each week we can navigate down to we have a schedule a collection of resources i don't know this lms link and contact all in just one page responsive mobile friendly markdown file uh presented by docsify this i think what's really cool about this is um like you you showing how to get started with docsify this is that you keep it so simple up front um but people can choose more complexity and and they have the option to um like you're saying um expand the number of headers uh heading levels that they might want to show on the sidebar um but they don't they're not confronted with all of this at once they can simply just get this up onto a page um and then if they if they need more they can choose to kind of go down that route and then what i also love about this kind of going back to taylor's point much earlier about how great this is for showing people how URLs work is that it also provides people with really clear um examples and reasons why things like working with proper headings is important so people are kind of learning through each step right it's like oh like they're learning good digital practice by using a tool like this and i think that that is one of the more valuable things about um such a cool simple and flexible tool like this that's great that's great to hear and and you're absolutely right you know if you're using uh you know semantic formatting for your markdown files right using header ones two threes to help structure your document then that will benefit uh every viewer of that file using docsify this and as you notice you can change the levels of content the levels of headers and your table of contents or your sidebar as well uh so it kind of makes it so you can present the most usable navigatable version of that markdown file based on you know your own preferences and the and the content that you're using for sure uh okay maybe one more example a template uh we can do something more complicated um for instance this is a multiple page site template which is basically like mimicking like like a four or five page website um so we can look at this through docsify this and basically you can have a big banner image and there's actually CSS classes that are documented with the docsify this web app that if you want to go to the next level and you want to include classes in your markdown markup you can do that you can even create your own classes so again it it's surprising how far you could take this simple tool but this is an example of a multiple page site with just the big banner image up top multiple topics we can click on one of those topics and go to that page we can go back home and you can see here if I go to topic three I have this edit this page link I can click on it and yes you guessed it we'll go to that file um so that is uh another example template I'm just going to close up a few tabs here if you don't mind so I'll just keep nice and clean here and um our my last example would be probably the most complex this is a multiple page horse site so this is the style that you saw maybe about five ten minutes ago when you were looking at canvas um looking at this repository just for a moment you'll notice something you'll notice for instance each module has its own markdown page you'll notice that there's also a file for your sidebar your nav bar even a footer these are these are not okay these are elements of doxify itself so doxify this doesn't try to reinvent the wheel doxify this leverages everything it can with doxify itself so this is all documented on the doxify site and I point us to it of course on my site um of you know for instance opening up a sidebar file it basically is a list of the pages that you want to include in your sidebar so it's not overly complicated and you can include also save icons or icons on that um but you know this is a little bit more advanced definitely that's true um however to create a multiple page site for a course uh that only consists of a collection of markdown files is itself a simplification and then by doxify this I simply point to the home page of that site and here it is everything comes together I have my nav bar my topics page my resources page my ux guide page contact page then I can look at each week jump into uh the materials that I want to for that particular week and then I have all my links to the lms so this is a completely contained self-contained website built by nothing more than a collection of markdown files and doxify this through doxify does all the heavy lifting so that's probably a good a good spot to stop the looking at the templates because that's that's the pretty complex if you understand what I'm trying to say it's it's still very simple in that it's a collection of basic markdown files however you know there's more files involved for sure but also you create a complete and entire standalone site through that uh template that's and I it's it's amazing what is possible there and again I'll just go back to like all of the structure of that you know is either present as you said in the markdown files themselves or the url telling the browser where the markdown file lives that should look at right um one question I have so I will say like if someone's looking at this stuff and it's like ooh I want to make you know maybe they've played around with making a couple things just basic things in doxify this they say cool I want to try to make one of the more complicated ones um I know that they'll find that okay there isn't a field for literally every single option right because that would be you would have I mean a web page with hundreds of possible options on it and on doxify this .net itself you do list out you know hey this option can be included by putting it in the url this advanced option for the case of a multiple uh for your one of your more complicated templates how would you suggest people go about making that should they just copy the template and start editing it or I mean maybe maybe my question isn't a great one but I'm just trying to think of where would someone get started once they've looked at the basics and they want to say okay I want to see if I can make something more complicated how do you suggest people do that I think your suggestion of using the template and cloning or forking it is you know it's probably the fastest way to go particularly if you're looking at like a multiple page kind of scenario single page very straightforward I mean really I include examples but you could use really any markdown file right it's once you start getting into multiple pages and you want to include things like a custom sidebar or a nav bar yeah you're right then it makes it makes most sense to kind of copy or clone that template as a starting point but let's go back and and and one thing to kind of show you too is that with on the doxify this homepage there's a lot of stuff like intentionally when you first get to this page it looks like easy breezy I got a field okay I can paste a markdown file on that and I got like a few options and then there's like scrolling down it's like all about doxify this and this is actually the documentation of the the app and as you were asking about there's a section of ready to use markdown templates so in this section they can see like a little preview of these templates you'll notice that maybe some of these are now a bit familiar to you because we've gone through a couple of them right and there's links to for instance they can go to the github repo that contains the files they could work them if they want or copy them or clone them but there's also all of these links which will take them to actual URLs to show what you can do so for the multiple page core site you want to do like a standalone core site with even a search function so you could tap on that link and you can see that not only now do we have that multiple page core site but we have a search function now where we could actually type in something and find content so this is really the next level of you know you can even add more functionality far beyond the stylization of content but adding extra functionality and if we go to that URL we can see here that we've got a URL prounder search equals true that does all the magic by the way and then doxify this knows okay you want me to index these files and include a search box but the original question that you asked was you know how would you you get going so you know again you could start with the template you can also explore the different example URLs to see that but there's one more thing I should show you let's go to that template and let's go to the we've got to find the home page that's the markdown file we want okay I'm going to copy that markdown file and then I'm going to open up my doxify this instance as you mentioned there is an option to show some more additional appearance options okay so this allows you to like set a title tab allows you to change your font family link color header levels so the intention here is to get okay you want some stylization what are the most common and important stylization options and based on my learning of my audience and also my own needs you know this set is supposed to be kind of like that bucket okay so like this bucket hopefully will enable you for instance to repurpose content in like a WordPress name even or repurpose content in your canvas lms but if you want to make a multiple page site with a custom sidebar you know that that's a little bit more complicated I don't know if you know this Taylor maybe you do but you can actually access that in the webpage builder as well you don't need to go into the land of your parameters if you don't want to more recently I have introduced what is called an advanced mode of the webpage builder a little experimental but I'll show you what it looks like basically there's a list of all the URL parameters that come with the default page builder and these are all described here for you and if you scroll down there is a second list that is also included that's they're valuable but they're not as commonly used but they're available in what's called the advanced webpage builder oh what's that let's tap on that this will reveal the advanced mode of doxify there this is now everything that is possible with doxify there and do you know how that mode is set that mode is set by yes you guessed it a URL parameter now it's not the most obvious thing it's true but allows for something very powerful to happen that is if you have a group of educators or publishers who are getting going with doxify this and you need to provide some more advanced capabilities you can share and and distribute a URL to then allow others to also advance you know access this functionality so again this is it's not experimental as in it's buggy it works really well it's experimental as in I've decided to at this point only have it as a URL parameter which also means guess what you can do you can bookmark that you can bookmark this and then with one tap you can bring up the advanced mode so again there's lots of interesting advantages of doing it by URL parameter but I want to show you that now we could paste in that advanced or multiple course page site right and we can scroll down I'm just going to get that disappeared and we could say load a custom sidebar load a custom nav bar cross our fingers tap publish a standalone webpage and baboom here we go so without using anything manually you can do that but it gets even better because if you have a group of people again like I say the scenario for myself is to help other publishers and educators use this tool you can even do something like this where you can look at a published uh doxify this URL copy the parameters that you use to configure this particular setup go back to your doxify this URL and add those parameters and reload the page and now you've got a URL where look the sidebar is automatically selected go down here look sidebar custom and nav bar automatically selected so this is actually a URL to preconfigure the doxify this web app to help others get going even faster because you can show them and preconfigure it it's almost like you can help them at the keyboard level and configure what they need so now if I press this publish button here's the site oh oh you know what happened I need to recopy the URL of the uh it's not a demo right unless something hiccups I need it's a real demo now that's a real day so I had to repace the URL so I've done that and here we go and there you are cool yeah so you can template your templates in some ways yeah yes you can you can preconfigure even the doxify this interface by URL parameter you don't have to you don't ever have to know any of that but it's an example again of how scalable the tool can go in terms of not just publishing but to help other people get publishing even faster remember because that was one of our goals wasn't it to help people get into markdown publishing as fast as possible and that also can involve even configuring the tool right to help you do that especially you know some of the folks who may see this may be interested in the first level of okay I have a thing I want to publish it I think a lot of folks who will encounter this are in the in the situation where they're helping someone else work through something maybe with their students or another group of people it's like okay I need a tool that can do this so having this sort of one layer back customization of doxify this itself invaluable for that I think so that's that's really cool to see it's that easy to do they don't have to necessarily like you know hack up your html let you they don't have to take your thing and fork it and make a bunch of changes to how it works to do to make it fit their own needs really simply so yeah for sure cool I mean we've got you know we have we've been recording for about 50 minutes just about but is there anything else you want to cover one thing I'd like to show that is how folks could potentially host their own doxify this instance and I guess why they would want to but is there anything else you want to get into well how would you feel as a segue to that if I showed a little bit about doxify this with hedge doc or is that something you would like to do now that that makes perfect sense okay so and of course hot tip to you Taylor for discovering that with hedge doc with hedge doc you can actually access the url to the raw markdown file so you know that that was something that was new to me and once you had discovered that and shared it there's a lot of cool things you can do and I know you've you've done a session with hedge doc so I'm not going to rework that but what I'd like to do is I'd like to show a sample of what you can do with combining doxify this with hedge doc and so how does that sound sounds great okay so let's take a look at a hedge doc file and so this is a hedge doc file I won't go into any details but hedge doc is a great way to collaboratively or on your own edit markdown files online and it has this really nice presentation mode at least I like this mode where you can edit and see your raw markdown file on left hand side in the preview on the right and you can invite others to edit this content and all that kind of stuff it's great so the thing is is that okay you've got this content in hedge doc wouldn't it be nice to be able to present that content in different ways and maybe leverage something like doxify this to do that so indeed that is possible by as you're going to describe in a little while Taylor you you do need your own instance of doxify this to do this it's because basically with hedge doc hedge doc needs to have presence of being on a server and so every hedge doc instance is on a particular server doxify this doesn't know that unless you tell it so currently what you need to do in order to combine hedge doc with doxify this is to create your own instance of doxify this and in the html in the index html file just include the url of your hedge doc instance so anyway that's something that maybe you'll you'll be talking about a bit later but that's basically what I've already done for the demo hedge doc doc org instance so hopefully this will work I'll take this url of my hedge doc document I'll go back over to my own hedge doc instance I'll paste this url in and I'll publish this down on the webpage and by golly am I happy it would um and so here is the hedge doc document and you got it we can do things like add a table of content we can do things like add a doxify sidebar we can even do things like include and you can tweak the text of this edit this link but for now I'm just going to check market and that'll actually take someone back to the hedge doc instance of the file so now you've got this nice two ways in street don't you where you can present your content in hedge doc but also in your webpage provide a link to go back to the hedge doc document so now that we've seen that why don't we close a few windows just quickly take a look at you know that remember that one page course template let's go there one page course template this is that one page course template in hedge doc I'm going to take that url and I'm going to go and uh paste that into my page that into my hedge doc instance here and I'm going to add a table of content but this is what I want to show you is that now I'm in hedge doc if I make a edit in hedge doc as soon as I make that edit and by the way of course there's version tracking in hedge doc that content is updated you can see it here in my preview and to get that published with docs by this or that update you don't have to do anything I mean it's done because docs by this has the url to your hedge doc file all I need to do is refresh the page and you can see here that's been added so it really does provide a very fluid and fast way to now partner a collaborative version controlled very user-friendly editing environment with hedge doc using docs by this to then publish out share stylize right because now you see here with hedge doc you know blue links let's say if we go back to our our instance I hope I'm using the right one um I can change let's say my link color to red and go to there and you can see well pinky red and you can see that oh yeah we can now stylize and change that content presentation but not change the style of the hedge doc document um so I hope that was a good little demo of how you can combine hedge doc with doc survive it uh what do you think so far I think yeah I think that's really it's a beautiful marriage of two very um simple tools right well in in in that I think they're both relatively easy to get to terms with how to use them um and yeah I love the idea of simply editing you know a file and refreshing it over here and it's it's completely live instantly it's I think uh a really powerful option right and and obviously you could you know for instance if you didn't involve hedge doc and you say had your markdown files and github you know github has an editor on the website and it works pretty well it's a nice editing interface but it's not um truly collaborative the way hedge doc is where multiple people can be writing at the same time like a google doc um and I actually think hedge doc is possibly simpler to use if you're especially if you're new to markdown um hedge doc because of the way that it previews things and the the toolbar I think it's it's pretty simple to use maybe actually github just updated their editor so it's it's pretty good too but um but the nice thing is hedge doc is also self hostable too so you can be completely hosting it on your own or or in like reclaim cloud or whatever service it can live wherever you need it to so yeah for sure I think those two tools I mean work together and again kudos to you for discovering the slash download uh option with hedge doc because that all of a sudden as soon as you can access and this goes for any tool right like whatever editor you want to use or editing your online platform etc as long as you can access your raw markdown source you can then bring that into docs by this while you're not really bring it in but anyway you point to it from docs like this and then you can present it you know which is really expands the possibilities of reusing that content awesome so um should I demo how to set up your own instance on reclaim hosting I think that'd be awesome great great so I'll do that I totally forgot to share my screen since my internet kicked me out let me so let me do that um so uh here we go okay so um we're gonna do kind of the similar thing to what you demoed in in some ways because I think I do think one of the main reasons why you would want to host your own docs by this instance I can think of two basic reasons a you want it to live on your domain name which is I think valuable right like if you want to have this add a nice branded domain it's if especially if you're linking directly to it and not embedding docs by this somewhere that could be really valuable and um we'll we'll go through it when we upload a copy to the server here but there's more options other than just hedge doc like that you've included in that too that you could lock down for say what URLs are allowed and things like that um this is our document that we're going to try and show um that you know that we have been kind of using throughout this course here this what is the web um uh page here that is already in a doxify sorry a hedge doc instance I get I get next mixed up because the subdomain we chose for this is docs dot reclaim ed dot tech but that's just a coincidence um and uh so if I go to doxify this dot net um and Paul you've already mentioned this doxify this this page we're looking at right now is just some files basically so we can basically download this and host it almost anywhere so right from here if I go to the github if you're really comfortable with git or github there are all kinds of more advanced options that would let you do things like you could fork uh paul's repository here and set up like a github action to deploy it to your hosting if you wanted to or you could use github pages and map a domain name to that or you could use um you could use the command line to clone it down like there there are many ways but I wanted to kind of show here like what's the most simple way if you just want to download a zip file and put it someplace um so from the doxify this uh repository I can literally just hit the code here and download zip or I can go to the releases either should work um I imagine technically I usually recommend folks download a release because this is paul going and saying here we go this is the latest known good version is that what you'd recommend or do you normally just have people download the zip file I think either one would be good usually you know I always make sure that whatever is the in process at production doxify this is working without any issues but a little bit of extra safety would be downloading a release as you highlighted yeah um I'm going to just grab the zip that's what I've been doing when you know deploying this recently um but I always like to ask because you know different uh different people have different practices for how they kind of use git you know um all right so I've got that zip file I'm going to go over to a c-panel account we have here this is our reclaim ed.tech c-panel I'm already logged in of course I've also already made a subdomain that I'm going to put this on this wouldn't have to be at a subdomain it could live in a lot of places but I'm going to make a subdomain or I wanted a subdomain called doxify.reclaimed.tech that's what we're going to go with so I made that that's pretty easy to do um but I made that ahead of time I'm now going to go to the document root for that or I could just go in the file manager but I'm here so I'm going to just click on that this is this is the folder where the files for this subdomain exist and all I really need to do is now upload that zip file extract it and move some files around and I'll have my own copy so I'm going to hit upload here and select file and the way I'm sharing this you can't see it but I'm just selecting the doxify this zip file that I just downloaded great so now I'll go back and I can just reload this here and now I can extract this zip file and that's fine and so it will have extracted it into its own folder and so now we just need to move some files within this dox folder so if I go to doxify this main and then this is kind of somewhat meta information about the repository is basically what I would call it but this dox folder this is the website itself basically this is all that you need so technically not every one of these files is completely necessary but it's really easy and not going to hurt anything just select all the files in this dox folder and we're going to move them and the way this this you know if you're using like an FTP client you could you could do it that way too but I kind of want to do this right from cPanel because I think a lot of folks who use our hosting are going to do it this way if I select all those files and hit move like I just did it's going to say great where would you like to move them to I just need to clip off these last two folders here so that it goes right to the folder for my subdomain move and that's it now if I go back up two levels I can really just delete this this doxify this main folder and the zip file because I don't need those anymore and now I have my own copy of doxify running at doxify.reclaimed.tech there we go so this is exactly the same as what is at doxify this dot net right now so um well in theory maybe you have customizations but I think it's exactly the same from here I can now edit this index.html file to do more with it and customize it a little bit so if I hit this edit button in the file manager there's a lot of stuff in here this is the entire page including all of the the magic that's converting markdown is called from here in certain ways right but um if you scroll down to I believe it starts yeah right here at about line 106 um there's some configurable options and we won't go through all of these but you can do things like you know customize specific default things uh have okay yeah set dark mode to permanently be enabled things like that um what I'm going to do I think focus on just for the moment is these two options here allowed domains really interesting so you can say set allowed domains to continue single or multiple comma separated domain names to control which domains can be used for hosting what this would let you do is say oh our doxify this instance can only work hosting markdown files from these web domains which could be really nice if you have something that's maybe a little bit more official and you're worried about people like using your doxify this on your domain to link to something you know that it doesn't belong to you it belongs to them um the other one is this hedge doc instances this will enable hedge doc support if we tell it about our hedge doc server basically in our case if I go to my file over here our hedge doc lives at docs.reclaimed.tech so I'm going to copy that go back to my index file here paste that in and save it and now if I go back over to it's the wrong one if I go back to my doxify instance and refresh won't really nothing will have changed just yet but I can go and copy this hedge doc file and um I think I may have to trim this off but we'll try it here um I should be able to publish it but oh you know what I I think I actually have to refresh here um nope okay whoops so the last thing I have to do is just get rid of this final part of the url parameter here because I the way I grabbed this I didn't actually grab a publicly available link but once I fix that there we go and um now I've got a doxify this version of this hedge doc file just like you showed in your demo um and I can do all the same things I can go to show more appearance options and change the color let's let's make it I don't know we'll make it green maybe a little darker green and we'll pick uh helvetica yeah and we'll enable a sidebar um and same deal um so that's kind of front start to finish how you could set up your own docs by this instance on reclaim hosting and configure it to look at a hedge doc uh document and it all worked woohoo it did yeah um so and again I can I can edit this just like you're showing same thing here I could go what is the world wide web there we go it's it's all instant which is just so cool um so uh that is um yeah I I think you know one of one of my favorite tools are tools that you can kind of remix and repurpose just in general I would say and I think doxify is such a cool example of that um in sort of something that could only exist of the web because of the way like URL parameters work and how you know you're you're grabbing stuff that lives on other servers in the case of the markdown files you know and um well in and doxify itself I suppose in in some ways that um so I just I love the work you've done here to kind of try to make something simple that's also powerful if you want to go looking for that power um and uh yeah I think it's a really cool tool that more people need to to know about thank you so much it's been great to share the tool with you uh both today and uh yeah I mean I hope it provides another option again you know it's it's premised on the idea that you have people who would like to and work with markdown and if you like to and want to work with markdown and it gets benefits for you to do that then as you describe doxify this could be a way to start going into markdown publishing and then see how far you can go um uh with that so yeah no it's great and again awesome to see that demo and it worked uh so so so good even better well you know I mean I did I'll I I did test it before we started recording but um but uh but I've been I've been using this already so I mean since you've been you know making the changes to make hedge doc support work so simply I've been kind of playing with it and and messing around with it and there's so many possibilities you know as you said if what you're choosing to use is markdown there's so many things you know the hedge doc is a tool that you know obviously part of this flex course that we talked about but like I also like to take notes in obsidian so it's like okay I could take my obsidian note and publish it over here and then pull it in the doc it's just the possibilities are endless when you have a tool as flexible as something like this so um thanks so much for taking the time to share it with us and uh if folks have questions they should check in in the discord yeah this is great thanks so much paul well thank you no it's been a pleasure for sure see you