Posts tagged: markata

I can now just mention people from my markata Waylon Walker Blogroll like @simonwillison or @swyx.io

January 24, 2026 1 min read

It’s sad to see textualize.io close the doors, but textual is still alive and maintained as a n open source project. I tried to use it very early, and struggled, this was before docs and tutorials really existed, before a lot of the widgets and components existed. Then as we all do I got busy and moved on to other things in life and did not have the capacity to build TUIs.

I like tuis, I like staying in the terminal. I use lf daily to move files around when I want something more than mv and cp. I use k9s hourly to monitor and manage my kubernetes cluster.

As awesome as tui’s are, they are more effort to build, and less automatable. I feel like the first stage into automation of a project really needs to be a good cli, and this is often good enough for the project and I move on.

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Today I fixed a bug in markata that has been occurring for a few months where the description for posts come out as None if coming from cache, the issue was a pretty simple check and pull properly from cache. This fixes all the descriptions in feeds and metadata on the post.

While in there we went ahead and improved our get_description to more accurately return plain text without escaped characters, remove cutoff words, and add an elipsis if the description cuts off the text.

While I was there I made longer form posts, til, blog-post use the super description of 500 characters instead of the regular 120 character description.

I realize that I never did a post on markata 0.8.0, so here it is. 0.8.0 was released on Jan 2, 2024, just over a year ago at this point. This was the release that we got pydantic support, and multi feeds.

Markata is leaning on pydantic for configuration and Post models. These models are filled with validators such that you can give it an empty markdown post and it will figure out some pretty sane default values for the frontmatter. From there you can progressively enhance your post with more information like title, date, tags, slug, description.

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A side effect of Markata DidYouMean is that we are able to implement some rudimentary search based on slug, title, tags, and description.

I made a video of the early work on using this side effect to search for content on markata.dev.

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In 2024 I built my own reader after years of being bitter about google killing reader more than a decade prior.

I built it on top of my own static site generator markata, feedparser (🐍 Parsing RSS feeds with Python), some jinja templating, and tailwind.

After putting all the work I have into markata, it makes projects like this fairly easy to build out with just a custom loader to load new posts in.

I’ve added htmx to my blog. It’s extra bloatware that I long avoided, but it’s so damn convenient.

Ok so it’s not bloatware, but it’s not the theme I was going for. I wanted my site to be as lightweight as possible. I had at one point gone too far and had Mb’s of react that did not provide any value for the end user.

markata pre-release 0.8.1.dev10 has been released with support for feed partials on pypi.

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This post is a work in progress.

Markata is the static site generator that I created to build my website about this site. I built it for me and I enjoy using it. I know everying it can do and I can extend it to do more easily. I have set it up for some friends to also use it and am proud that it helps them publish their content.

It’s a meme to create your own static site generator to make your website. Yes its funny, I don’t recommend it if your not ready for the level of work that comes with it, but at the end of the day it’s very rewarding and a great way to learn.

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I open sourced the static site framework that I use to build my-blog among other side projects. It’s a plugins all the way down static site generator, that makes me happy to use.

{% gh_repo_list_topic “waylonwalker”, “markata” %}

my-blog is built on a number of small repos. I set it up this way so that creating content is fast and easy to do. I don’t have to worry about carrying around large images with my lightweight text files just to make some posts.

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https://youtu.be/-42A5210HYo

Super fun steam Broadcasted live on Twitch – Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/waylonwalker

We worked on markata todoui, a command tui trello board written in python using only markdown files to store the data. I love markdown and I want to make this my workflow.

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Here are some CFP’s that I used for PyOhio 2022.

https://pretalx.com/pyohio-2022/cfp

Markata is a plugins all the way down static site generator, that covers all the things you need to go from markdown to a blog site out of the box. Since it’s plugins all the way down you can also rip out all the default plugins, and do something completely different with the lifecycle.

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