idiot's guide to standard.site

i'm pretty sure you've seen this bluesky post:

View post on Bluesky

and you might be asking "what the FUCK is a standard.site??? where are these names come from???", well, let me explain...

"but lime! didn't you already explain it in skittr blog?" YES I DID

the way i did it was kinda stupid so i'm doing it again

so what's standard.site even about?

imagine you are in 2007, you found a cool blog and you want to stay in touch with it, so you do this:

download a feed reader

find the url of the blog's feed, copy it and then paste it into your feed reader

and some time later, you get new posts from that blog on your feed reader

people that lived during the golden age of the web might be familiar with this kind of technology and it's very simple name: "rss" (there's also atom, which looks like it's the same thing as rss, but it's actually now)

standard.site (later referring as "stansite") is similar to rss, except it's different, VERY different

what's the difference?

you can see followers

although it's not really THAT necessary, stansite offers a feature that allows you to follow favorite blogs from different platforms (leaflet, pckt, offprint, etc.) using your bluesky/blacksky/northsky/eurosky account and you can keep up with your fav. blogs no matter what device you use

you technically can do the same thing with rss by memorizing or writing down every single feed url, or you can use an opml list which carries all rss/atom feeds, but you have to keep it preserved and make sure you don't accidentally delete it

it's flexible

stansite offers platform-exclusive features for simply displaying markup on blog posts, you can create your type of markup for your platform or reuse it from an existing one

and if you just prefer markdown, markpub got you covered

"why can't we just embed plain markdown in a single json file like how whitewind does?"

well, you can, but it would exceed limits depending on what markup format you use

and speaking of whitewind, i just WISH it had stansite support but it's pretty much an abandoned atproto platform so the chances are kinda low

you can plug it anywhere!

and if you don't want to use an existing platform, you can simply grab you existing site and integrate stansite!

it supports any type of blogs, from basic static sites on neocities to wordpress sites, to even plain rss feeds!

i use sequoia for skittr blog since it has support for static site generators (astro, eleventy, zola, etc.)

this actually sound cool! where do i start?

there are ALOT of stansite browsers you can use, but i'll list a few ones:

leaflet reader

pckt reader

docs.surf

pub search

i hope you have a great time exploring blogs (and maybe creating one) on the wider atmosphere!