Poster blog posts as text file instructions

Love Poster stack. Definitely one of my favorites.

Always set posts up in Rapidweaver, but just starting a new site and figured I might give the text file method a try, as it would be so much easier to just write everything in markdown and save them to a folder.

My question is how would I add a graphical ‘read more’ button, and how do I reference the meta data, set categories and tags, etc, from within the text file. And how about adding say a small image justified to the right of the 20th paragraph for example.

Maybe I am expecting too much of the text file feature in Poster stack, but it is such an amazing stack that I wouldn’t be surprised at its hidden capabilities on this front.

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Most of the textual metadata fields are documented here:

You are able to create a nice read more button directly inside RW.

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That’s awesome Yannis. Working my way through it now. Looks like it will do everything (as I expected).

I’m figuring I will store my posts in either a spreadsheet or a database and somehow generate the individual txt files from that. This will allow for quick entry, updating, etc. If anyone has any bright ideas as to how to generate multiple individual text files from a database or spreadsheet please do let me know.

Thanks for your quick reply and the link to that great resource. I’m excited to get going.

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Hi Yannis, got it half working, but for some reason the meta data is appearing on the page even though I have the 3 hyphens before and after it. Here’s the simple txt file I using:

*— *
*title: This is the blog title *
date: 2018-09-15
categories:

#This should be the title

This is the body copy that comes BEFORE the readmore tag.


This is the body copy that comes AFTER the readmore tag.

But this is how it is looking when I load it in my browser, which looks like it should work as it is just the same as your example. Hope you can tell me what I am doing wrong.

Can you share the plain text file also?

Here it is Yannis:

https://writing-therapy.com/blog/posts/post1.txt

and here is the blog itself.

I’m also struggling with how to get the category links on the left. Previously I’ve done it using the html below, but that doesn’t seem to work now.

CATEGORIES

@Pip I may be wrong as I have not used Poster’s markdown post approach for a while. But markdown is quite strict in some things. So what I notice is that you have a markdown lists. There should always be a space/line before and after a list. Thus it may need to read like this:

--- 
title: This is the blog title  
date: 2018-09-15
categories:

  - Tips
  - Web Design

description: My great blog post content.
header_image:
  src: https://writing-therapy.com/assets/images/blog/How%20writing%20can%20help%20us%20make%20sense%20of%20things%20and%20heal.png
  alt: Altenative text
---

#This should be the title

This is the body copy that comes BEFORE the readmore tag.

<!--read_more-->
This is the body copy that comes AFTER the readmore tag.

I may be wrong as YAML may work differently.

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Please try to remove the blanks before the hyphens inside the markdown list of categories (as @mitchellm said, YAML is quite strict).

@Jannis and @mitchellm

I have tried it both ways, with and without lines, and also with and without spaces. I just copied it from your example Jannis and left it as it figuring it should work.

Do you have an example txt file I could give a try with Jannis. I’ve just done this one in bbedit so can’t figure why it wouldn’t work and why the metadata is just being displayed on the blog post itself.

Actually there have to be 2 blanks.

Yeah I know it’s a bit complicated.

Yeah!

I think I’ve figured it out. It was the hyphens on the Mac, or at least from the page I cut and pasted from.

When I cut it from your page Yannis and pasted into BBEdit it put what look like hyphens to the human eye. I ended up going to the YAML wiki page and cutting the hyphens from there and once I’d pasted those in everything worked just fine.

My guess is that it is the Mac.

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@Jannis

One more question Jannis (or anyone else in the know) how do I specify the styling for the quotes.

I know how to do this in the normal Poster stack, and have them looking great, but want them to look the same now that I am doing it from text files rather than via Rapidweaver itself.

Thanks

Which quotes in detail?

The quotes that I’d normal set the styling for circled in red in this screenshot:

Where you click on the plus button and select Quote Styler. But that option is on the Poster Item, and I can’t find where to do it on the Poster folder Jannis.

Most probably that’s not possible. Remember ist just text.

If the scribe quite @tav is a block quote you might be able to add it with a markdown blockquote (Markdown Cheatsheet · adam-p/markdown-here Wiki · GitHub) and some custom styling.

@Pip Playing upon what Jannis just wrote … using Scribe isn’t possible to define things in Poster when you are using remote posting. However, you can add CSS to your RW project file or to one page. If you know how to use the web page inspector you might be able to capture the CSS code scribe uses for blockquotes. I use old school CSS. For example here’s some CSS I put in for my project file (i.e. all pages):


blockquote {
  margin: 3em 0 0;
	padding: 1em 2em 1px 1.5em;
	position:relative;
  background-color: #fde7b4;
  border-left: 1em solid orange;
}

Of course you may not like this style at all: tweak and change as you want. But it gives you a beginning point.

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OMG. Stupid me. I can’t believe I did that. I’d got it into my head that the quote style was coming from the Poster Stack. I am that used to using Scribe I forget that I’ve got so much set up in it. Durrrrrrr! Back of the class for me today.

Thanks @mitchellm

I will do as you suggest and have a play with the CSS. I thought I might be able to do it with the FontPro styles, but it doesn’t seem to be picking up on that.

How about I add an option so that you can use the Scribe Quote styler to affect all block quotes on the page? I’m happy to do that if it helps.

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That would be absolutely awesome Andrew!!!

I love Scribe and use it ALL the time and so that would work brilliantly. It is my goto stack for pretty much everything, which is why I made that mistake. I almost forget I am using Scribe and that this functionality isn’t always available.

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A post was split to a new topic: UIKit 3 and Blockquotes