3mo ago

BlogOnLemmy - I made my Blog using Lemmy's API

./Martijn > Blog | Talking about everything and nothing. | Electronics, Cybersecurity, FOSS, Code, RSS, Linux, Lemmy, dQw4w9WgXcQ, Android, Fediverse, News, Audio, Research, DIY, Games, Linkdumps

Lemmydocs 7:4 – Thou shall create a blog

Features

Linked to a user using Lemmy’s API, no authentication
Host content on any instance
Category filters: Set one or more community as the categories
Easy to adapt to your profile
One page constraint
Anchor navigation and permalinks
Responsive
Dark / Light mode
No cookies or tracking
Interactive “about me”
No backend: serving a single lightweight page that can be hosted anywhere, including GitHub
HTML, CSS and ES6 JavaScript. That's it.

TODO

Possible compatibility issues with older iOS devices. Let me know if you encounter an issue! I'll be cleaning up the code in the meantime.
The only class not written by me is the markdown-html translation layer for which I'm using snarkdown. It does so using regex queries. As to not completely re-invent the wheel I've forked it for this purpose, but I'd like to write one myself.

GitHub | ./Martijn.sh > Blog

19 comments

This is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing!
- I'm glad you liked it, thanks for the kind words!
Why not just use an actual federated blogging service like write freely?
- That requires the running and maintenance of a federated instance, which is not easy or cheap. Doing it like this allows anyone to make a BlogOnLemmy by serving but a single webpage, no extra server cost at all.
  
  So, schlepping it off on other instance owners, so they host it, which as you say is not easy or cheap.
I was just thinking about this this morning as we will be going on a 6 week roadrip around NZ and I cant be bothered to stand up my wordpress server again
- Feel free to use the code in any way you like, and enjoy your trip!
I’m a little lost. You mention hosting content on any instance, or on GitHub. How does that work? And if your content is elsewhere what is Lemmy doing? Authx?
- A lot of static site blog generators use markdown to create posts. Lemmy also uses markdown for its’ post formatting. From my understanding what OP has done is that he made this post on Lenmy and has created a front end that basically retrieves the given post from Lemmy and displays it with a more traditional blog style CSS as well as a few other pages that aren’t hosted on Lemmy.
  
  This is in it's simplest form a blog frontend for Lemmy indeed!
  
  Ok so you’d literally be making a regular Lenny post to some particular community on some particular instance in that case, right?
- The content seems to be hosted on https://0d.gs/
- I sepperate the hosting of the content and the page itself. With a website you do need to still be serving a html page, because it has no backend the page can be served by GitHub for example.
  In theory you don't have to touch the website anymore, so you use Lemmy as your markdown frontend.
  A constraint like this ensures someone can host their BlogOnLemmy without paying for anything like hosting space or running the instance themselves.
A blog entry on how it works and what it does at a high level could be nice. I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but there must be some API call to Lemmy and it's probably happening on the server due to CORS; not sure how this would work just in the browser if the Lemmy instance has CORS setup...
Edit: OK the instance 0d.gs does in fact not have CORS 😮 That's a little concerning...
Hold up, neither does programming.dev? Uh... @recursive_recursion@programming.dev and @Ategon@programming.dev is that safe? I'm not a security expert but doesn't this allow for cross site attacks?
Anti Commercial-AI license
- I've noticed that a more detailed writeup is warranted! So I'll be working on that.
  CORS is enabled on lemmy, you have to send the 'Origin' header in order to get the Access-Control headers. Which allows cross-origin for simple requests. No added headers, cookies or other data. So all API calls are made in JS by your browser.
How come I can't see the Lemmy comments on your blog?
- Good question, it's a design choice. Being attached to my name I had no interest in needing to moderate which comments should and shouldn't be showing up under my name. There is a direct link to the posts on lemmy where they can be interacted with.
  A second concern is XSS, with my own content I have no worries.

19 comments