 Hello Hi there. How's it going? I'm I'm doing pretty good. How are you doing pilot? I'm doing pretty well. I have My coffee which is I guess now a feature of Not just not just streams, but I guess any meeting involving me. I feel like I've had them in You have coffee. I thought you're like not fully not a coffee person No, I got remember last year around Christmas time I was like do people have recommendations on Anything about coffee because I don't know anything. I mean, I remember that but that doesn't mean that you just really like fine I'm gonna learn coffee or learn to like coffee. I guess Would say probably that what I drink is not coffee because I made this realize that I forgot to put in the chocolate syrup And then put it back in the blender Is so this this is a drink don't let people harsher coffee choices. It's all right I I I I like myself a like nice Flavorful black cup of coffee but if I have coffee that I don't like that much or Is just like darker roast. Yeah, I like to have a little bit of mouth. There's no wrong way. I think that's her But we're not here to talk about coffee. I mean, yeah We maybe some point we should but that's probably not the best video experience for people. So No, we are not and We are here to talk about Just kind of catch it folks up with what's happening in our open publishing ecosystems flex course and so we've been we officially kicked this flex course off on November 28th and And With our first session on hedge doc that Amanda and I did and since then we've also covered manifold and Docs by this which was great because we got Jojo Carlin and Paul hibits in for those for Respectively Jojo for manifold and Paul for Docs by this in for those sessions to talk because they're they both work With the tools in the sense of Jojo is heavily involved with the manifold team and Paul it it's kind of his thing. So Docs by this is so it was really cool talking to the both of them about like you know, not not only what can this thing do but like what what's the What's the idea behind the tool? Who is this for? What problem is it trying to solve right like yeah when? Yeah, everyone just because everyone's got different design goals is that's how it works. Yeah, exactly and the the the best thing about That was was hearing the different Angles people take on this stuff. I think to me that's really always really interesting and You know like the manifold team when creating manifold I'm positive did not Start out by saying there's no way to publish anything on the internet. It's like no there are ways to do that We're trying to solve this Problem right and as they define it basically and so that's been kind of a heavy focus. I think is sort of that intention with each of these tools especially as we talk to folks who develop them and So that's been a real highlight for me it's kind of hearing people on that To be clear the flex course is not over. We have one more session In which we'll be talking to Brian Olendike about hacks. We actually just recorded that yesterday for full transparency And I'm really excited for that session and see what people Think about the tool, you know, we've been we've been Very upfront about the fact that all of these tools are Wildly different in what they try to solve and how they try to solve it And I think hacks is actually in some ways The most It is weird because it is in some ways the most similar To say WordPress as a CMS in one way. I mean technologically, it's very different, but like It is a little bit more Has more goals as being slightly more of a general purpose content management system now It can fit a lot of roles and I do think it has a lot of tools that are very specifically and interestingly geared towards content creation for a course and that's by nature of Where it's being developed out of and we'll talk about that more in the session but but you know the Hacks is kind of the whole widget in that you use the tool and you can make pages and sites and Make your content and then use that to also view the content whereas a lot of the other tools we talked about very much more specialized in like Curating content and displaying it and the reading experience for instance, that's manifold to me and what how you can organize things as a journal You've got hedge doc, which is much more about editing markdown files and yes You can publicly display them, but it doesn't have much controls or capability there and Docsify this is really about displaying markdown files. It by its very nature has no you know editing in terms of the editing the content so It is interesting in that in that way because I think a lot of times And even in the session, you'll hear Brian talk about how hacks is so different in terms of how it's built and why that matters for For them for for the for the folks developing it and what that allows them to do in terms of developing the tool So what I wanted to do Is kind of give Almost a play-by-play. We're not gonna go into huge detail. Obviously. We only have a limited amount of time but I wanted to do a little play-by-play of Kind of some of my favorite stuff that that we've gone through of the course and Things that have happened not just in the videos, but you know outside in discord and things like that. So Yeah if folks Haven't already or aren't aware already the We do have all this information at our event calendar so events that reclaim hosting calm and put up a banner Taylor. I got you Yeah, thank you And we have links to each individual session you can register which means you'll get email updates There's only one more email update that's going to be going out, but you know, this is here and We've got little short descriptions and all the dates and times and things like that But what we also have is at reclaim ed.tech are our sort of home page for a lot of these flex courses and events that we're doing We have weekly blog posts. So Well, we do have the welcome blog post that you know also kind of breaks down where things are and how to participate I love that. You have so much. It's a it's a very good gift. Yes Yeah, I think here. Let's give it a little more screen real estate so So you can check out the welcome blog post and that's awesome, but sorry bye. We have to say goodbye to the gift for now but we also have weekly posts on kind of recapping what's happened and And links that were shared in in the discord during or or in the video. So this first session where we covered hedge doc was just Amanda and I and we Really talked. Honestly, I think we spent probably more than half the session laying out why this entire flex course mattered to us as a topic in an idea and one of my favorite things of this is as Amanda shared a story about About her writing a novel as like as like a sixth grader and that was just like that's what she wanted to do when she was in front of a computer or had a computer available to her is work on her novel and How for her that was in Microsoft Word and that was her only conception of how to write on on a computer That's the two that is the thing that you use the word processor that exists well and even as a sixth grader Being unaware of the category of word processors as software. It's like oh Microsoft Word is my word processor It's like no, no, no, no, there's one program. It's called Microsoft Word and it lets you type things Are there other things that let you and that's where the words go. Yeah, that's where the words go exactly so talking about that and what that means in terms of you know being locked into one type of tool right like if she was at In front of a computer that didn't have Microsoft Word. It meant she couldn't write her novel So I thought that was a really great Great story to kind of articulate like both. This is sort of a software and tool and capability issue but also all of these things link into you know, like digital literacy and just Being effective and knowing what knowing how things work all of those things are connected all the time and you really like When you use open tools, not only does it offer you some capabilities in terms of flexibility and where and ownership of your content But in in my opinion inherently playing with these things and learning about them Let's you make more informed decisions about your technology to you'll learn about it along the way So I thought that was great. I really enjoyed that session We did also of course cover hedge doc itself and like what it does. It's you don't know It's a collaborative markdown editor. I say you though the viewer. I know pilot knows Yeah, I mean a little a little bit. Well, you've used it, right so The it hedge doc is a nice little tool. I'm a big fan of of what it enables really and You know, we we do have it's something you can self-host and reclaim cloud And we do have an installers. It's really simple to get running with it if if you need hedge doc and It's it's a great tool. So Yeah, I'd highly recommend checking out the session kind of hearing like us talk man and I talk about, you know The idea of markdown at all like why are we jazzed about markdown? And in what does it have to do with this course and then what does hedge doc have to do with that? Which is to say in my opinion, it makes hedge it makes markdown easier to use and learn But also collaborative with other people, which is there's not a lot of tools that that make Markdown easy to use with a group of people the way hedge doc does. I haven't seen anything really other than hedge Yeah, it's been making me think about I mean this this comparison kind of already exists, but the idea of like we've talked about Google Docs as a Interoperable is not the word. It's definitely not the word Just said the word that I work collaborative. How long did I get there? but as a collaborative editing tool but one of the things that I've been thinking about is like How nice it would be to co-write in something that was not Google Docs This is not new ground that I'm treading. I'm just saying yes, essentially. Well, and what what does that let you Let you do I think really interesting things like peeling the curtain back a little bit like using Our work here at reclaim is an example. I Actually think for instance the roundup could be a really interesting use case because we you know We draft this newsletter every month you do a lot of it But we also have other folks here at reclaim contributing to it, right? So I write, you know a certain part of it basically you guys are columnists essentially. Yeah. Yeah, um and Featured contributors So We do that in ghost and we pretty much I at least how I do it as I write it in Actually write it in obsidian and then I just copy paste it into ghost when I'm done And I think we all do something like that like we we draft it someplace our sections and Put it in in the ghost editor when we're done The reason we do that is really only one person at a time can be in there and actually be able to save in ghost Yeah, and that is WordPress is like that too You know says maybe this might change because we need we do need to move ghost to a newer version But right now our version of ghost also lacks a feature that wordpress has which is wordpress Well, so you can't go into this right now someone else is using it and ghost doesn't do that ghost will let you go in and start Making changes and then when you save it it goes Buddy you can't save right now because other people are also making changes. Yes, or alternatively you can save But I do have to go deliver some bad news to the other person currently working on the stock Well, that's what I was gonna say it's better than the alternative which I have seen ghost do But not recently but which is to say Yep, we saved your version of the document right over the top of everything else everyone else was doing right? So which is no good because then they lose everything too. So anyway, you know Could ghost make this better by doing what wordpress does. Yes. Will they? Probably someday. Maybe they already have I don't even know we do need to upgrade our version of ghost, but But even then it's no we can't all be in there at the same time It's but it helps you manage the limitation of only one person at a time. Basically. Yeah But for instance, uh ghost does do Really great markdown parsing, right? So We could theoretically and I will say also um I frequently Don't even do that. I frequently will draft it in obsidian I have actually done this in in hedge doc as well And just copied the preview output of markdown right into the editor That way if you have to make changes or anybody else has to make changes They don't have to deal with markdown. I like markdown, but not everyone does right? I like markdown I think if we were all like if we did move into hedge doc for the drafting and like if we all did it And then we copy pasted then it would work, but I think Right now as it is I usually go in and try and format everything into sort of a uniform Yeah, and that totally makes sense So so, you know, but the idea of us all working in hedge doc and then being able to Really cleanly like when you are ready cleanly paste it over say like cool all the content is here I'm ready to put it in ghost now. Um could be interesting. I don't know if it's something we necessarily need but But without hedge doc that would not really be possible in a reasonable way I google doc like copying out of google doc or microsoft word for that matter Into an editor like ghost or wordpress in my experience Is not great. Um, if you're really careful about what you copy and just just the text And then you reapply all the links and you manually upload all the images you can do that But at that point it's not it's it's a pain. I mean, it's not that bad It's probably faster than retyping it. But uh, well certainly faster than retyping it But depends so much energy you put into formatting too though true true. Yeah. Well in like I have definitely in the past I don't Again, I haven't done this because I found that me writing it in obsidian and pasting it into ghost works pretty much flawlessly, um, but um, I have in the past done things like Write out stuff that I knew I was going to copy paste someplace else in google docs But leave out all formatting and like all my links I would just put in parentheses after the thing I wanted to link kind of like markdown actually Um, and so then it was just sort of like, all right, this is unformatted and I'm going to paste it over there And I know it's going to be unformatted and then I'll go through and manually add all the formatting And I just like that, you know a tool like this can let you I don't know do something better with your workflow, especially, you know our our Our roundups have a lot of images. So that's a complication, but they don't have a lot of crazy formatting. It's it's pretty standard stuff That's ghost doesn't let you do much in the way of um, at least our version of ghost doesn't Like there's only two header sizes. You can only do h1 and h2 right now Hmm, that's interesting So I so most of my ghost experience before the roundup was when my my blog used to be a ghost blog Like many versions ago and at that time ghost only supported markdown. There was no editor the way it is now Um, it had a preview like it was not bad to use or anything Um, it was a little bit like obsidian where it does like inline preview So you see all the markdown, but then if you make something a header it makes it larger, you know Yes, and then if you click to a different line, it'll remove like obsidian when you're in the line obsidian will say, ah, yes, uh God, what are they called the hashtags? I guess there's a there's a real word but pound sign pound sign pound sign H2 and then you click out and it goes no, it's just it's just big. It's just a header. Yeah, so um I know mark ghost will do more than the header one and header two because Um, a lot of my old posts have that. Um, so I bet you can only do other header sizes if you use markdown The nice thing is ghost lets you actually seamlessly go like if you make a markdown block it doesn't look Like in the final blog post people won't be able to tell that you're switching. So anyway, um Yeah, so that was a great session hedge doc And I I do think people could benefit from looking at that tool because if your goal is to collaborate on something And then the text ends up someplace else later It may be a lot easier to transform it from a markdown file to something else than a google doc or word doc depending on what you're doing so um, cool, so That was week one. Um, we are Not making fast progress through these weeks, but that's that's okay. I mean Well, it spends 20 minutes on each topic and we've already done three We're we're perfectly on schedule. That's fair. That's fair. Um, so a couple other things We have this sample doc that we linked to And this is something that we made in hedge doc actually quite a while ago In partnership with uh, s and c They have this domains camp project. They're going through and we help them with some of the content for it. So um, this is one doc that we Basically delivered to them in a different format, but we used hedge doc as a team to draft it And so we use this as our example So what we did is we shared this link with everybody and every single week of the course We've been taking this and putting it in whatever system we're talking about just to kind of demonstrate This is what it could look like over here and things like that um We uh did um ether pad came up in the discord during the recording ether pad is a really awesome tool It's very similar to hedge doc in purpose in that it is a collaborative editor Except it's not marked down for focused. It's more of like a its own rich techs kind of thing So ether pad is much more a direct google doc Kind of replacement. It is simply this is google doc's kind of but you can host it yourself and it's open source So again, really cool tool. It does have some features that hedge doc doesn't have like right right in i'm glad it has popped up It has like built-in chat and things like that, which is really interesting um, but Did they get rid of it? No, I meant sorry hedge doc doesn't have chat. Yes. So um, and it has like good commenting This is one thing that I do. I wish hedge doc did better is it it has It uses like a format of markdown to do comments But it's not comments the way you want them like in google docs where you can have Named people and you can converse in the yeah, it's it's more like commenting your code than it is like leaving A comment. It's exactly annotations. That's a really good way of explaining into it Like if you know what code comments are in that it is markup in line in your document That is exactly what it is One thing that I didn't actually talk about In the session I wish I would have or um, but you could combine some of these tools to get that functionality So one thing you could do and we'll we'll get to doxify this later is you could take this file Run it through doxify this and check the box to enable hypothesis comments And then you could kind of get wow functionality, which is cool. Huh? So, um It's really three tools that you're using at that point, but it's pretty simple like So this is really why we call these these courses ecosystems. It's like everything Can flourish together. It's it's they're better than the sum of their parts, right? That's the that's the goal um, so type aura and obsidian these came up. These are um desktop um markdown editors that you can use so I type aura is I believe on every platform I use it on my mac mostly But um, it is paid. It's like $15, but it's a one-time purchase. Yeah, they even have a linux client. So mac windows and linux Um type aura. I really like um for if I'm working with just a single file and it's not um in my obsidian vault It's it's a nice tool if you're looking for something that does a really good job of working with a single markdown file um Obsidian is amazing and we have a lot of fans of it around here But obsidian is a whole note-taking system I will prevent myself from talking too much about it because it's not about obsidian today, but Um, I use the heck out of obsidian literally It's one of the apps that's open on my computer all day And usually has a dedicated spot on my monitor just to like type like capture things as I think of them But it is a fantastic markdown editor, but it's really more for like creating a personal knowledge base basically or or note-taking system. So The cool thing about obsidian though is it's free to use. There are paid features for um, if you want to use their sinking service or publishing service So sync is I actually do use their sinking service because it's really good and it's worth how much I use it The publishing one lets you take an obsidian vault and basically make it into a website Which is is interesting. I it um I've not used it though. I'm I'm honestly really intrigued by both of those because um one of the things that I really like about Google docs specifically um Is And and markdown you can do this because it's it's happening in browser. You can do it for google docs as well But I think you've mentioned that obsidian you can run on your phone. Maybe Yep, I use it every day on my phone too. Well, that's the thing that I really like about google docs specifically is the ability to Like pull up the app at any time. So if I'm like like I'm gonna go take a bus to visit my parents um for the holidays over the weekend and if I wanted to write something down I don't want to have to pull out my laptop and get onto a hot spot or something I can just do it on my phone And so now I'm really tempted by the obsidian sync thing because I Would love to be able to Do that Um more easily Yeah, I um it's it's mind-blowingly fast and good. So, um, I Um here bring my screen back in for a second This is my obsidian vault and I have like I use like a plug-in to automatically make daily notes So basically when I open obsidian the default thing is it's going to like jump me into a note For the day formatted how I like because there's there's one true formatting system, which is year month date I have the same plug-in and the same formatting system. Oh fantastic. That's good. I felt like I was alone with that I know, um, you know most americans like month day year. I recognize that that is silly Even though it is what everybody uses Most europeans use day month year, which I think makes more sense But then it's easy to confuse because of the slashes. So anyway, it's I the thing with day month year is that like if you want to use it to sort your files It's even more difficult. Terrible. Yeah unusable. Yeah, like with at least with month day year You can say all right. Here's everything from I guess every december that's ever happened And then we'll get to all the november's later But like for for if you're sorting Day day month year you'd get all right. Here's everything every first of the month that's ever happened Yeah, it becomes much more difficult and this is why year month day Best one true at least at least in files and and stuff on the computer. That's where I most often use it I don't find myself writing. Uh, actually I am increasingly writing in this way too, but I don't write a lot of notes by hand. So whatever I'm this is maybe a weird me thing, but I'm like hyper aware of uh I mean the more that I like write to clients and I put together, um Uh Paperwork and stuff like that the the more hyper aware I get of different time zones and different like date formatting Styles and so I move towards This Because it is universally recognizable Like there is never going to be any no one's gonna mistake this. Um for anything else. Yeah So anyway, um, so I haven't written really anything in here today other than I put a heading for the stream I tend to kind of like make headings for major things I'm doing that day Um, but anyway, um, but the cool thing is like the sync is so fast. So you can see my phone here I'm sure you can't read it that well, but like if I start typing. Oh, yeah, it's going to be there As soon as I'm off of the line. It's very very fast And then sync obsidian sync also um does backups so you can restore just like google docs So anyway, um, there are free solutions. You can use um iCloud you can put your obsidian vault in iCloud drive and then it will theoretically sync between devices But in my experience, it's nowhere near as fast nor is it as reliable You'll end up with copies of notes because it'll be like Ooh, you edited this one, but there were changes over here. Luckily it won't destroy anything But it will make copies and I just I was like I will I use this enough I will pay the eight dollars that is worth it for me actually and I think they have a yearly discount that I actually paid for anyway, that's obsidian um the um We also mentioned that we do have a video on our hedge doc installer itself. So we went through this about a month ago and um demoed kind of our work on it and You know what how to install it how to set it up. So that that's really cool We didn't really cover how to install it and reclaim clogs. We had enough things to cover um, and then this is really fantastic too. So um, amanda linked this uh learning module um on from the uh geneseo center for digital learning critical digital practice course and how to think about using markdown as daily journal this is actually similar to what I do in obsidian but Like a fully diy way to do it, which is really interesting and cool. So I think this is worth a read if you're uh, if you're at all interested in this stuff or a markdown nerd or whatever So, um, highly recommend that. Yes So finally moving on to another session Uh, we got 25 minutes. You know what these don't have a set time. Let's go for two hours. It'll be fine yeah, um Manifold the session two and um, so jojo carlin joined us for this session It was a fantastic Like I said, we had I think a really interesting conversation where jojo was talking about You know, what what is manifold trying to solve? What is it trying to do? We spent a lot of time talking about that in various different ways And I think it's core to understanding why you should know or care about Why you should care about manifold at all basically because you look at manifold on the surface of it It's like, okay. This thing is helpful for publishing specific types of you know, this is for Publishing in like the academic sense, right like publishing Journals and and even like research projects and that is great and it has all kinds of Tools and metadata to help you organize that But it also is very focused on the reading experience Which I thought was really interesting to hear her talk about and something that I had not really thought about much like mostly like the end goal For most the tools that like you and I deal with on a day-to-day basis as as working at a web hosting company is like Does it display in the way we want right? I've got a menu up here so people can click on it The article display cool. That's kind of what you care about You can make me might hear about the design of the website, of course. Yeah, we spend enough time arguing about a full site editor for sure for sure We should maybe even rebrand community chats as full site editing monthly. Um, I think It's got to come up at least once a month. We can't encourage this tale We need to try and be something more I think people it's what people need people people need to to talk about it and get the feelings out about it because it's yeah, um, so the the idea of Manifold being more than that And also being a like delightful place to read. I think yeah is an objective of that software Or a goal of that software. So, um, that was really cool. We talked about Um, some of the tools that had in there. Um, so if I go to our example doc We'll use that my cat you can't see her but she's currently on my desk Trying to pick up my microphone. So once again our favorite participant. Yeah. Oh god So this is Our demo where we took that domains camp doc. I just put up a banner with the link I would heavily advise instead going to the manifold Thing because you can't copy paste out of this video. Uh, and it's not the nicest looking URL so yeah Go back about a minute and use the blog post link I'll put it in discord too if you happen to be watching live or or recently Um, but so anyway, um, it's got you know, okay, you can go through it's got a nice table of contents Which is cool. Um You can star that's that's really interesting. Okay, um And um, you have Built-in annotation, which is really neat. So we've mentioned hypothesis just briefly As a another annotation tool And I love that that manifold has its own Highlighting annotation system built in and the intention here The the the intention with manifold is anyone can make an account on a manifold instance It's just not everyone has the ability to like make, you know, new new stuff in it Yeah, but by default you can go to any manifold instance make an account and start putting highlights and annotations in there which is really cool, um and means that It's it encourages sort of that experience on the the digital publication, which I think is is I don't know maybe a conversation going on like it encourages It embraces is the word i'm looking for right like and and also you can turn it off, right? So you can have a publication that has annotation and highlighting turned off for certain public ones Uh turned off for certain parts of it, which I think is also really interesting. Um, and uh making that a first-class citizen in the tool. I think is just a brilliant idea. So, um it's I think I maybe missed this is can you you can see other people's annotations and highlights too, right? You can so when you make one here if I highlight, um Let's let's highlight. Uh, it doesn't matter. I don't know why I'm yeah, I'll highlight this sentence. Um So I can annotate it highlight. Let's let's make This a highlight if I um click on this I can change the group says your current group My private annotations and I can change it to public you can also add more groups You can have like reading groups that are organized in manifold which is super cool It's it's really interesting. Um, and that's that's not even getting into the um Some of the just reading features here. So first of all, I think out of the box It is just like a nice reading experience. It you know things look Um attractive But uh, it does have the ability to turn off and on yours or others highlights and annotations. Um, you can Uh switch between reading groups here Um, you can even like nicely like turn all of it off at once But then you also have this menu where you can change the the font the To be a serif or sans serif font the size of it the is it dark mode or light mode? Uh, even change the margins, right? So this kind of like blends the line between content management system and like E reading system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which is That's the the the the switching modes thing is also really nice because that's a We were talking about like we think a lot about how to get your stuff out there in the format that you want it but like the There's a truck going by but the um The idea of there are a lot of people who would really prefer a Uh, light mode dark mode toggle or something like that. Um, and that's you know, some sites build that in But that's very much not at the forefront of your design goal You don't want to make two sites when you can just make one necessarily That Taking a very long way to say the thing that you already said which is adding Those e-reader functionalities to make it nicer for the person Who's trying to read exactly and make it to choose, right? Like this is not Uh, this centers it around the reader Yes, the designer of the website, right? Yeah, um, which I think is really interesting. Um, you know It also makes it easier, right? Like you don't have to From a whole cloth create this stuff for a publication. This is built into the software and and even I'm I'm just from like a um A higher level perspective From the writing point of view that really puts it on the person writing to care a lot more about The writing that they're doing because the Styling of the site is not is you are taking the styling of this Site and putting it outside of your concern. That's no longer your job Um, I guess I guess like copy editing and making sure that's good is your job but you can't Worry about How it'll look visually to the reader because that's You simply can't you have to focus on the text and and there there are visual elements You can consider right like there are resources you can this is Not the most rich example of what's possible in manifold because again We took a markdown file and literally uploaded it like I I have not changed anything about this, right? But there are you know other types of resources you can include in manifold. So um, there's some of that, but it is it it Encourages you to focus on the content. Yeah, not the design. So yeah, that was a fantastic session I really had a great time Um, Jojo's amazing. Yeah with with making it. Yeah, it was just fantastic. Um, there's a couple other links in here. So talking about Um retooling the monograph. This is uh fantastic if you're curious about how manifold started Check this out. This is this is gonna get you Backyard into the project that was going through this too fast. Go to the blog post. Here's the banner for the blog post Um, oh this this blog post. Yes. Um, yeah, so we've got we've got that we have a community page Um from manifold that just kind of talks about some of the major instances out there and who's using it which is really great if you're curious about that Uh, we mentioned specifically some examples of that. Um, the metadata. Oh, I don't even remember what this is Oh, okay. So this is information about the metadata that manifold supports Um, and it is informed by Dublin core. I was gonna say it's making me think of Omega which is a totally different platform for totally different stuff, but it's still Similar metadata. Yeah, you can tell librarians were involved. Yes Which is good because what we don't need Well, you know what I always need but no what the rest of the world doesn't need is Another classification system Yeah, and you also It's good that attention is paid to that stuff, right? Yes, if um if for instance I was capable of making something like manifold and indeed I did do that I wouldn't have this because I don't know about that stuff and it would be it would be worse for it, right? So, um, you need you need people who care about those things involved So also just a direct link to the github. Um, if you're curious They actually have a whole bunch of repositories about like various Tooling that they have and of course some of it is really for developers of it But you can also put issues in here. Um, which is is good and um, yeah, so that's a link to the github Um in our example doc. So that was manifold. I had a a blast Making that session and um, I'll should check it out. Um Then if I go back to our listing of blog posts here, uh, we also had uh, most recently so this week doxify this um, and Doxify this is such a unique and interesting tool in my opinion. Um, and it was great talking to paul about You know his vision for it and what he's trying to do. I've said that a couple times, but um, but I think is also Possibly just as important in the man as what it was in the manifold session because doxify this Well, it's a little bit more straightforwardly like you have content in this case in markdown format and you want it on the web That's what it is for The actual niche of how that works is what he's trying to solve. So he's trying to make something that anybody can use Without even having to have like hosting which is really interesting. Um, so doxify this is a browser-based tool for what well, I was just gonna say and like Going back to the november community chat where we talked about what people wanted Some of the things people were saying was like, how do I get as far away from What is the lowest tech I can make this? Exactly. Yeah Yeah, and in this case, you know, you can um Take a markdown file that you've put on your own web hosting or in github or in codberg, which is like a github alternative Uh, really anything that will let you take a text file and upload it somewhere to be displayed Um, or just hosted I should say this will display it in a pleasing and customizable way. So Yes, um fantastic video Paul I think does a really admirable job of designing this tool to be something that is at first Dead simple, which is to say you give me a link to a markdown file and I'll give you a web page Basically is is the relationship with the tool But then you can go down and customize Almost anything about the way that's actually displayed in really interesting ways. So Low threshold high ceiling. Yeah, exactly. And we we also talked about and this is just something that I Really find cool from like a educational perspective is that it also is really interesting. You can see at work um How the tool is working without even examining the code? Um, but but by examining the url because the way docs find this works is all happening in your browser um, so when you Take a box like enable hypothesis commenting You will see uh, that little option be added to the url for your file Which I find interesting if you're talking with people about what urls are and like how to look at them and Um, you know people may be more familiar with this with like have you ever tried to like drop a link to an amazon product to someone? And it's like this ungodly disaster of tracking and mess. It's super long I think firefox recently rolled out an option where you can Not just right click a link and then select copy link, but you can right click a link and then below that There's also the option to copy link without tracking. Yes. Yes, it did and it's fantastic um, but if you've ever had to clean that up manually, which if you're not using firefox or Uh, or in all but just more like two weeks ago. I think it's pretty new Um, you you probably either have just lived with these most I think it's what most people do Or like me you try to find out like what's the minimum link? I can include here and it still works and then I like try an incognito window or private window or whatever Anyway, there's takes a million years, but it's worth it. It's worth it um for me, um, so but you know, uh, you you start learning like oh, you know like The if I'm looking at a url And there's a question mark equals in there that is like Possibly not an important part of the url. Yeah, it's adding something. It depends on the system and the tool, right? But that might be something you can lose. Those are called Uh parameters, I believe url parameters. Um, all of doxify this is options are via url parameters basically So it's super interesting to see that change. We talk a little bit about that. Um, so uh, if I go here I don't know if you can this is our sample document. Uh I don't I was gonna say I don't know if you can make your A url larger. Yeah No, I'll paste it in something else to make If you if you paste it anywhere, I can um get to it. I can put it as a banner Oh, sure. I'll I'm gonna put it on screen because we're gonna manipulate it a little bit. Oh, yes No, that means way more. Let's do that. So this is um, But okay at first I should say this is our sample document again So in this case, it's really cool because doxify this is actually displaying this sample document directly From hedgedoc. So if I was to go in hedgedoc right now and maybe I will I will add it as a banner just for reference, but we're gonna take it away soon when we start doing science I can edit this document And if I go over to doxify this and refresh it Hey, look There's my new text. It's just really cool Yeah, it's it's fantastic and that's because what it's doing is directly displaying This is the public markdown file And that's what doxify is displaying. So if I refresh it here, I'll go back So if I go back to the actual base instance here Um doxify this you give it a link. So if I grab my doxify file here, and I I think I'm gonna have to pull the question mark edit off of it to be honest with you What we recommend is just hit the publish button and grab this link but uh anyway, um the You grab the link to the file and most often, you know, he uh, we're talking about putting this file in github codeberg You're just your website like on a subdomain like something like that And then you hit publish and it's going to display it, right? But um, so that that's what it can do and it does it in this nice clean way It can be embedded into other web pages and systems using iframes Which is super cool and we demonstrated like what why you might do that by like embedding it into a canvas course Or in the case like uh, elen laveen uses this for documentation of splots So it gets embedded directly in wordpress admin, which is super cool Which means he can update documentation Even if the theme's not updated you'll still see the latest version of the documentation, which is super cool Um, but you also get these other tools so you can say like oh, I'd like a nice little table of contents or sidebar I'd like to edit this page link. So let me grab we'll do a sidebar um, and I'll do this again And now I've got a sidebar But um, you can also go into more appearance options and do things like change the font Let's go with. I don't know. Lato Lato Let's change the color. I'll make it let's let's make it like a truly horrendous like mustard yellow I mean do pink that's gonna be better. Um, let's do a bright pink. Um I'm gonna change Well, we'll do that. We'll start there. So now the accent color is pink Um, yes Change it to have it says the maximum header header level of the sidebar. So let's say in this document. We mostly have header This is the wrong tab. There we go In this document, we mostly have header one and two But if you had a document that had other header sizes, you couldn't you could just decide What level gets included in that sidebar? You can also separately Uh, have that setting in the table of contents. So the table of contents view looks like this So it puts it on the right side here. Yeah And even better than that, there's also an advanced view for changing just about everything and um, if you're like me and Inpatient I go here and I do a control f for advanced And if you click on advanced web page builder, you get this different View of the builder Where um, I don't know if this is going to work with the s. No, it doesn't need to not include the s in that url Oh, I also realized I'm not on the right instance. That's it. Um, so Um, I need to include that there Um, this is the advanced Um version of the builder that Are we sharing that url or not? No, don't worry about it. Um, it's it's a link on doxify this but now you get all kinds of options including like changing the page title and Oh, this is cool enabling zoom images. So this is like, um, I have this set up like on my blog Yes, so I'm just gonna Yeah, I gotta put the Text One So if I click on an image, it's going to do this with it Um You can enable a search field in the sidebar, which is super cool. If you have a long document um, you can have uh link to The or change the website name display there and there are more options in this even that aren't available as the GUI So all of these things are url parameters that are documented in here and you can do all kinds of crazy things with But as you can see as I change these options, let's say Let's change the font again and the color And publish this again. It's going to change the url to include these options. So if I if I go back to my text edit window here Yep, there you go. This is the new this is the first url We looked at and this is the new one and you can see all of this other stuff family And uh with having the font information there and link color So it's kind of cool that it itself is happening all in the url, which is really interesting. Um Even the advanced view Itself is just a url parameter Right if if this is technically if I got rid of this this is the link to our doxify instance But if I have question mark advanced equals true on the end of it It's going to do the advanced version. It's just super interesting to me. Um, so just just a fantastic tool in its simplicity But but you can go down the rabbit hole right like for sure yeah So um and doxify this is something that you can just I mean if your needs are simple You can just use the public one. So it's doxify this dot net And this is the one that paul I think he just hosted on github pages But and you can use this but if you want this at your own custom domain name Which if you're going to be linking to it You might right like it would be good to do that because it's a domain you control and and all all the good stuff that we know about domains, right You literally just download the folder from github And upload it into your c-panel and extract it and we demo that in the the video like if there's nothing else to it It's just a bunch of files. Um, and if you want to update it, then you do that again now if you're Uh, a big fan of like get in github and you know how to do that stuff. You can also use get to burn to do that so you could Clone the repository from the command line or you could set up like a github action to automatically push and update it But I kind of wanted to show people like look, it's just a folder of files So like you can just put it there And I think that's possibly the most understandable relatable way. It's how our instances manage right now But I don't know maybe at some point. I'll have it do automatic updating, but um, yeah, it's it's just just Just some files. So, uh, really simple and it's simple It's good So that is that was our and I already navigated away, but that was our third session with paul and um, again just a blast Recording that um, and I hope people enjoyed it. It seems like they did. We had a lot of good questions We also had folks during that session ask about the Folks ask about wiki link support Which is is so cool because I was someone was like, hey, is this support wiki links? And I was like, nah, and I don't think it could And then like immediately paul was like surprise. There is a link. Oh, and we've got a test instance that already it works So super interesting. So in this case wiki links is just like it's not technically part of markdown, but it is often supported in Certain tools that use markdown obsidian is the big one and it's a way to quickly link between two different notes by their title um, so with this he showed using wiki links in a repository. So if you had a Repository of notes, you could use a wiki link to link to another note automatically all inside of docs by this So this I don't know if this demo is still up Looks like it is. Um, and at the bottom if I got a wiki links um, I can just sample page and it will go to the sample page note, which is yeah, so really interesting. Um And uh, yeah, just a fantastic session. We had a really good time with it. So um Yeah, um other than that like I said, we had our sample documents um, I think uh, we I think Amanda put this blog post together before the Before doxify this the wiki link before Paul Updated doxify this to have some preliminary support for wiki links But this is a plugin for doxify, which is sort of a tool that doxify. This is built on top of That that supports wiki links. Um, and I will say this has me thinking this plugin plus Paul's work on it has me thinking about like a fully self-hostable way to do obsidian publish This is what I'm thinking. Maybe I should take a sabbatical and try to figure that out I don't don't take a sabbatical then I can't work on it with you. Um But I actually think with If you constrained yourself to saying we're gonna publish a whole vault like all of it is public, right? Yeah, because it would be a little bit trickier to manage Certain notes being public and certain notes being private you could Do a script essentially that does some basic Formatting of the structure of those files. Yes, and then would be completely compatible with wiki links and The doxify this stuff. Yeah, one of the things I do think about though in in obsidian is that you can nest vaults Which is it's a weird way to handle things, but you can do it um so uh I have in my obsidian. Um, I'm not gonna There's not really a I have an obsidian like a folder that's We talked about like monthly daily notes. I have a folder for the current month 2023 12 and then I have a folder called daily notes that holds all of the folders of past months uh So that and then I have a supplemental which is where I put like I needed to make a note because it was taking up too much space or Something like that um, and then a vault that's just like blogging notes and drafts That's a good point. What what I probably would say is Our our theoretical tool we're inventing right now. Yeah would publish a folder, right? So if you want to have a public folder It will do that but it will do the whole folder, right? And that's probably how I would do it actually is I would just make a folder in my vault call it public And then And then what you could use is get to sync that so you would you would We we'd set up some instructions, right? So we'd say like, all right go open a command line sorry you need to use a command line for this probably and CD to the folder that you want to sync and run these get commands to publish it And then run this last script that I could make because the one tricky thing is you would need to do some find and replace on Um, potentially on some links and I would say like you might run into dead links or things like that Exactly and you would probably just exclude them. I think is what you would do So they aren't broken and then also for wiki links to work The way that as far as I can tell the way they would work is they have to be in the same folder structure So I think you would need to take all your notes and flatten them for the public version So they wouldn't be in separate folders wiki links work in obsidian Not right because obsidian is smart to find this it's not aware of that structure So I think for the public version it would flatten it all to one folder basically. Yeah But you could do that and then you know, you could either sync it like probably I was saying get um, but You know, I don't necessarily mean get hub, right? Like you could host on get hub if you wanted to But you could use get to the do the syncing the cpanel account to you. Yeah So anyway, um, that's that's another stream We're coming up with our stream calendar now 2024. Let's go for sure. Um, so I just this is what I like about these tools is that they're open to the point where they're flexible and interchangeable and remixable and I I find that empowering as a technologist. Yeah, um, and um, it's Yeah, it gets me excited. So uh, we are over time a little bit, but um Yeah, thanks pilot for joining me on this little recap it's just good and it's nice also to be able to I think Doing the recap has been very helpful to me in terms of thinking about the ecosystem of how these can all work together Like we've been touching on it, but to say, okay here's the comparisons between annotations and one versus the other and here's how you could Thread together markdown and obsidian and doxify to do mark the hedge doc and mark down Pipeline I guess I don't know just it's it's Getting to This has been fun. I'm dragging the stream out so that it doesn't have to end. This has been really fun um, yeah, it's been really fun and um, I'm excited for see what folks think of our last week in hacks and um We'll see everyone next week for karaoke. I believe on Friday. Oh wait, let me really quickly Say I should have done this banner before but I didn't what's next Tuesday's date? gosh Next Tuesday is the 19th text Tuesday is the 19th I'm I'm a fool and a fraud Uh It took me more time to make this banner Then it will probably be on screen But here it is Uh, you know what we'll do we'll we'll let the stream play out with the banner on screen for a long time Yeah, we can do a little outro. Yeah, we'll we'll definitely do that. Um, but yeah, thanks for thanks for joining me Uh pilot and we'll see everyone uh next time See you then. Bye