The other day I was looking for lyrics to a song. I went to a lyrics website and was hit with a wall of ads, despite my pi-hole! I then went to another site that put me into a redirect loop. It got me thinking about privately self hosting a lyrics site. I started thinking that lyrics are just a type of simple static content, and what would be ideal is an application in which you can upload multiple directories of markdown files. Perhaps the directory should be in a standardised .mds (markdown share) format for instance. It would essentially be a zip file with directories of markdown files and a yml file for indicating how it would ideally be displayed. Perhaps with an a-z, or perhaps text-searchable, or both. The styling would be configurable in the app and independent of the mds files completely. Does this kind of standard for sharing simple text or markdown in bulk exist in any capacity that encourages a known file format? I’m aware that static site generators exist, but they seem to be aimed at the creation of documentation, not at sharing it in bulk. I’m imagining easily downloadable recipe books, wikis, lyrics databases. Does this sound like something anyone would be interested in or am I over/under thinking it?

  • rako@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
    3·
    12 hours ago

    That’s basically what gopher is: a capsule of hierarchically ordered documents, easily browsable thanks to a normalized interface

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

    The web is one of its spiritual successor and is plenty usable to share text files. Most if not all software can generate indexes of content in a directory. wget and friends can be used to retrieve the whole archive. If you generate html files you can then style them independently of the content.

    • Carl Newton@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      Thanks. This is really interesting but doesn’t appear to be aimed at the same audience that I’m thinking of. I’m thinking of a solution for people who aren’t technical and just want to share documentation or static style information and view that like a documentation site.