NANTUCKET E-BOOKS™

A new blog platform in development

I write these blogs in my Shanty, the same markup language I use for books on this site. The text of these blogs is stored in a big text file, which then gets parsed into separate web pages. It is, in essence, a static site generator. I’ve also tried out syndication through RSS and Atom.

There has been some interest on Mastodon in using this parser as the basis for a blog platform, or to have other people use it. Today, I would like to get started on that.

Here’s what I am proposing:

This blog platform will be very much a “smol web” project. I read a blog post recently asking people to consider their website being run on a PSP, or another similarly-old device. How fast would it load? Forget no JS, would it still be useable with no CSS?

The static-site generator is free/open-source software: licensed under GPL 3, and the documentation for the markup will use the GFDL.

All images on the site would require alt text.

No AI/LLM-generated posts. Why should I be bothered to read what you couldn’t be bothered to write?

Syndication support for blogs, including RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed.

No user accounts. Writers can e-mail me their plain text files and images and I’ll upload it for you. Barring that, we could find some kind of collaboration tool to share files.

This will also be a free-culture project. No paywalls, and I would want you to license your posts under some kind of free-culture license. Calls for donations to Liberapay or similar crowdfunding platforms will be encouraged.

Comments will be allowed, though this is opt-in. I’m still going with Bradley Taunt’s idea of sending in comments by email. This is not a scalable solution, but it does allow for a slightly more personal connection when commenting.

There will be no sane-washing. If you are unhappy with Substack’s direction, consider this the opposite direction. At the same time, this will not be an “anything goes” platform, either.

Lastly, I will say now that if this really took off, I would ask for some kind of monthly payment to cover operations costs. I think I would do this through Liberapay. For now, I’d like to try this out, and we’ll beta-test it for free.

If you are interested, please email me at njb@natucketebooks.com and tell me what you would like to blog about.

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