geoffreymcgill
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
93
Submissions
42
Member since
Aug 20
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
I’m the author of Retype. I wrote this guide as a practical walkthrough for self-hosting an Obsidian vault. I’d really appreciate your feedback or ideas on what could be improved.
Comment · 1 year ago
If you need an option to publish your notes online, check out Retype (https://retype.com). You can use Obsidian or GitBook or any Markdown files as your GUI editor and generate a static website using Retype.
Comment · 1 year ago
My understanding is that the $64.25M in "bidding" wasn’t real, as it was likely done with chandelier bids. Essentially fake phantom bids placed by the auctioneer to simulate interest and push the price upward. It’s a common tactic, but many see it as deceptive, especially when it creates the illusion of genuine demand.
Comment · 2 years ago
I met plenty of Americans in both Iran and North Korea. American tourists often receive extra interest and admiration from the locals, who express a genuine warmth and fascination towards them.
Comment · 2 years ago
> was there anything fascinating about North Korea that you couldn't have gotten from South Korea
yes, a different perspective.
EDIT/ADD:
Witness one of the world’s most secretive states, firsthand experience of a communist regime, dynastic leadership, and a pervasive cult of personality.
Comment · 2 years ago
I've been to both and can report a positive experience. The DPRK trip was fascinating. The thing I remember most about Iran is how friendly everyone was to us.
Comment · 3 years ago
How about Retype? https://retype.com
Comment · 4 years ago
GitBook is a static site generator, essentially. Just wrapped in an online UI.
Comment · 4 years ago
MDX is interesting and powerful, although creates all kinds of portability issues and is a terribly leaky abstraction of what should be a simple content syntax. Very much (IMHO) against the ethos and beauty of Markdown.
Comment · 4 years ago
> or may disappear entirely is due to the lock-in and vanishing of previous tools I've used.
Another important point. Retype is distributed via NPM and NuGet (.NET) package managers. Once a release is published, we can't walk it back or remove it from the internet. There's also no gate-keeping with Retype or gate-keeping of content. You control the content, generation, and hosting. Retype cannot in any way disable or remove your website. Again, for better or worse, I'm not sure, but you are autonomous and anonymous to Retype, and at least the app, cannot disappear.
> I may give it a go on one project, but I can't see myself committing completely.
That would be most excellent. I would greatly value your feedback.
Hope this helps.
Sorry for the wall of text.
Comment · 4 years ago
> but it represents some amount of lock-in (though, less than typical since the everything is mostly plain markdown)
This is an important point. Retype has been developed with the explicit goal of preventing lock-in. For better or worse, I'm not sure, but the point of the app is that you are not locked-in by design. You 100% control the original source of all your data and that data is being stored in the absolute simplest of forms being just static text files. Your data is not squirrelled away in a proprietary app, or sass service, or spread across tables in some database. Sure, you (or whomever) might be skilled enough to extract that data back out of the database, but that scenario is certainly the exception, and certainly will never ever be as simple as just plain text files stored in a folder.
In the future, you might decide Retype is not for you, or a better system comes around, no problem. You control ALL the data. Just switch to a different generator. There's no exporting data out of some system and hoping you fetch everything, assuming you can even get the data cleanly out of a system.
Even gitbook is not that clean. You can mostly export your content out of gitbook, but that does include everything. They give your content back, although that is not enough to recreate the site with configuration.
Yes, there are a handful of Retype specific Markdown components that enable convenient UI components such as Tabs, Panels, and Buttons, but... those exist in all static site generators and Retype has by far implemented the cleanest syntax solution. That solution, by design, is also the easiest to port away from. Maybe the system you move to in the future does not support the exact same syntax, but it will be trivial to port from the Retype syntax to another.
For instance, compare the Retype Tab component syntax (https://retype.com/components/tab/) to docusaurus (https://docusaurus.io/docs/markdown-features/tabs), which is actually relatively clean compared to the mess that gets exported from gitbook. BTW, Retype 100% supports the block of Tab code exported by gitbook, so your site will "just work" without being required to do any cleanup of their exported syntax.
I would love to add many more components to Retype. It would be trivial to do, but I explicitly do not because I want to try and avoid vendor lock-in. If a better system comes around in the future, even I want to be able to port my project as easily as possible.
Comment · 4 years ago
While gitbook does wrap the branching/merging process in a UI that is digestible by non-developers, Retype is far more powerful because you actually use GitHub (or GitLab). You have the full power of GitHub, including branching, pull-requests, issues, reviews, automation, authentication, and everything else.
For example, here's the repo for the retype.com website, see https://github.com/retypeapp/retype
The entire website is built from simple Markdown text files.
Some of the projects we're working on are generating heaps of markdown files, so it's been nice to build and run a quality docs website directly from Obsidian.
Markdown first, no vendor lock-in, self-hosted.