Postprint

Post Print is a homage to the free (as in freedom) and open internet, Aaron Schwartz, and Ted Nelson.

Post Print
Information
Leader	cam#4507
Start Date	25 July 2020
Links
Production	Website
GitHub	Repo
All Projects

Can you edit a text file? You can make a timeline! Post Print turns text files in git(hub) repos into timelines. You can even edit the files using the github website if you don't know how to use git.

Post Print is a set of instructions to crawl and display data from a web of these repos. I've added a basic timeline of technology already.

Other ideas would be to make timelines

• The life of Aaron Schwartz
• Portal Community
• Coronavirus
• IDW Content

Drop a pull request on the repo or talk to me if you want to add to these or have your own ideas for timelines.

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Goals

• Turn plain text into timelines.

Design

What's a simple way to collaboratively build a timeline or series of blogposts? Host the data as a plaintext file in a accessible git repository. Use a 'website' to distribute client side code (react) to query and display the data as a website.

1 Data concerns

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 <https://pc.net/helpcenter/answers/how_much_text_in_one_megabyte> 
 500 pages of 2000 characters is about 1 megabyte
 10 years of blogposts, 60 posts a year, 500 words per posts about 1 megabyte
 • website main pages
   • bbc.com: 5.90 MB
   • npr.com: 6.95 MB
   • reddit.com: 17.07 MB
   • cnn.com: 14.00 MB
   • twitter blank login page: 3.34 MB
   • twitter user page 3.99 MB

2 What does this mean

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 • You can store an entire blog or timeline in a plaintext file
 • This file can be hosted in a github repo
 • The client can cache the file and only update when the git repo
   reports a different hash for the file

3 How to get the data

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 • REST api docs:
   <https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos#get-repository-content>

3.1 View root level stuff

─────────────────────────

 GET <https://api.github.com/repos/hyferg/time/contents>
 • Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json

3.2 View a raw document

───────────────────────

 GET
 <https://api.github.com/repos/hyferg/time/contents/aaron-swartz.md>
 headers Accept: application/vnd.github.v3.raw

Members

• cam#4507