Feedmark

Version 0.1. Subject to change in backwards-incompatible ways without notice.

Feedmark is a format for embedding entities in Markdown files with accompanying metadata in a way which is both human-readable and machine-extractable. Feedmark is a subset of Markdown.

To this end, it is not dissimilar to Falderal, however it has different goals. It is more oriented for "curational" tasks. The Dossier is (nominally) written in Feedmark format.

Informally, the format says that every h3-level heading in the Markdown file gives the title of an entity, and may be followed immediately by the entity's "plaque", which is a bullet list where every item is prefixed by an identifier and a colon.

This repository contains a Python program, feedmark, which is an implementation of an extractor for the Feedmark format. It is currently able to:

• parse a set of Feedmark documents and extract entries from them
• dump a summary of the parsed entries and their properties
• dump an inverted index of each property found, and its entries
• write out an Atom (née RSS) feed containing the parsed entries
• parse all of the "Items of Note" lists in The Dossier

Example Feedmark documents can be found in the eg/ directory.

Example Usage

bin/feedmark "eg/Recent Llama Sightings.md" --output-atom=feed.xml
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 7000 &
python -m webbrowser http://localhost:7000/feed.xml

Motivation

Why is this desirable? Because if your structured data format is a subset of Markdown, the effort to format it into something nicely human-readable is very small. YAML and Markdown are both fairly easy to read as raw text, but Github, for example, automatically formats Markdown as HTML, making it that much nicer.