Turns websites into Markdown

by david90 • 10 years ago

120 74 10 years ago

lsiunsuex• 10 years ago

I'm all for cursing in private conversation with friends and such when it's appropriate - but why do people continue to think it's acceptable in public examples of work? Will this go on someone's resume like this? What will an employer think?

I'm not questioning freedom of speech or self expression or anything like that. I'm simply saying, if you build a tool / live example / whatever and intend to show it to people - you probably should try to keep it professional.

As for the actual tool - cool? Markdown is great amongst programmers but ask random internet user what markdown is and they'll look at you like you have 3 heads. I've never understand the use of this outside of programming in things such as content editors or such.

Brendinooo5• 10 years ago

The author is free to do as he/she wishes, but when I see profanity in the title I'm much less inclined to click on it.

I wonder if I'm an anomaly and no one else cares, if other people feel the same way as I do, or if for every person like me, there's someone who is more inclined to click because they saw a swear word?

ourmandave• 10 years ago

Depends if I'm at work or not.

kaoD2• 10 years ago

I couldn't fucking care less ;)

Now seriously, it's probably due to cultural differences. Is profanity that frowned upon on the US (or wherever you're from)? It's surprising how sensitive the US is towards profanity for a country where "fuck" is used extensively in media.

I literally didn't think anything about the domain but it's probably because lighthearted profanity is much more pervasive in my culture, where it's used as an emphasis tool (and less for its shocking value in media). We don't censor (beep) swear words on TV either (which BTW seems ridiculous from our point of view).

Yes, I'm not going to swear in a professional setting, but I'm not going to think less of someone for their use of words. Words are just words. Swear words don't hurt me any more than non-swear words if they're not meant to hurt anyone.

It's a simple "fuck yeah". It's supposed to be an expression of joy. How does that hurt you at all? Why would it make you less inclined to click on it? Genuinely curious.

EDIT: Also, regarding that "what if there were 5-year-olds visiting this site" point I've seen elsewhere... In my country everyone swears and children aren't traumatized or anything. As soon as kids are old enough to recognize the subtext they refrain from swearing (in front of adults) themselves.

Don't swear in front of toddlers though. They'll repeat it over and over again.

BillyParadise• 10 years ago

Sure, I'll use it myself, but the name makes it inherently less shareable. To me, at least.

CJKinni• 10 years ago

It looks like the creator also created a profanity-free version - [Heck Yes Markdown](heckyesmarkdown.com) [HN Discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12461088)

moron4hire2• 10 years ago

Oh no! What will an empolyer think!? We must suplicate ourselves before our betters and beg forgiveness. Repent, sinners, repent!

Fuck. That. Shit.

EDIT: for a site that is focused on startups and entrepreneurship, y'all get really pissy when anyone challenges the employment status quo. When corporate culture can censor how people talk in colloquial ways, ways that are not at all harmful to anyone because words aren't magic, the culture is sick and rotten.

jeffkeen• 10 years ago

100%.

What next? "TRIGGER WARNING: CURSE WORD AHEAD"

I just hope he didn't code this while wearing jeans, as those are only permitted on casual Fridays. KEEP IT PROFESSIONAL, HACKERS

david90• 10 years ago

I only think of the Internet meme when I see the domain name. Well, a name can give you an impression, but I think the site itself matters more.

GoToRO• 10 years ago

They did keep it professional. You must be using an old version of Professional. Please upgrade to the latest version as older versions are not supported any more and they suffer of multiple "don't tell me how to live my life" vulnerabilities. :)

mosselman• 10 years ago

My first thought was 'cool, but too bad for the childish title'.

arkitaip• 10 years ago

If your future employer isn't mature enough to handle you swearing on a project you have done, then that's an employer you should skip.

Brendinooo5• 10 years ago

Conversely, plenty of people would contend that refraining from profanity is a mark of maturity.

guessmyname• 10 years ago

As a non-native English speaker, those are just semi-random words to me unless I give them a context. I guess if you are a native English speaker you will feel more likely to disapprove the words, same if someone decides to buy a domain with bad words in Chinese, French, Spanish, etc if you are Chinese, French, or Spanish speaker respectively. Also, as I understand, "fuck" seems to have different meanings depending on the context.

nine_k• 10 years ago

None of the context-dependent meanings are particularly polite.

Jaruzel• 10 years ago

'FuckYeah' is very common on tumblr for site names i.e. fuckyeahcarebears or fuckyeahlawnmowers.

Whenever I see fuckyeah anywhere, I immediately think it's a tumblr user or thing. My bias of course, but I can't be the only one...

Also, had I paid more attention to the URL before clicking there's no way I'd have clicked on it whilst at work. I am now waiting for the Office Internet Police to come and have word with me :(

justinator• 10 years ago

Tease. There's no fuckyeahlawnmowers.tumblr.com

wastedhours• 10 years ago

Weird that swearing is still seen as taboo - guess it depends on location and sensibilities, but dropped the C word several times in front of my manager and never batted an eyelid.

Think the impact tends to be overstated somewhat.

aethertron2• 10 years ago

Whether it's said out loud, or put in writing makes a big difference.

If spoken, the speaker can first check to see if the immediate context is appropriate. Then it's just a memory.

In writing, like on the web, there's more persistence. Sweary words online can be brought into inappropriate situations later. This can reflect badly on the author, in the eyes of some.

executesorder663• 10 years ago

What will an employer think?

Makes me think this conversation from a while ago at my work:

CIO - It's okay to swear in commit messages.

Lead Programmer - Yeah, I'm just deciding between shit and crap.

majewsky• 10 years ago

In company-internal commit messages, I wouldn't mind if people swear. But they shouldn't do so in commits to open-source projects, where the whole world might get to see their writings.

Unless, of course, they include the obligatory disclaimer that "my swear words are not necessarily those of my employer". :)

Frequent open-source involvement is also the reason why I won't ever swear in commit messages. The closest thing is that I put "I'm stupid" as commit message whenever I have to fix up a typo or obvious slip from the previous commit.

thr0waway1239• 10 years ago

But...how else can they compensate for the inherent unremarkability of their tool?

Besides, they are much cooler people than the rest of us and it is really important that we understand that.

jackmaney• 10 years ago

I know that this may come as a shock, but the internet wasn't built entirely for five-year-olds.

justindocanto• 10 years ago

Not everybody has to worry about future employers.

Not everybody builds things with mass appeal in mind.

Not everybody has to understand the reason for something.

Some things are done for ourselves and how we like them, regardless if it has some sort of use case.

Veen• 10 years ago

I don't think Brett Terpstra really gives a fuck.

As for Markdown, I'm a technical and marketing content writer and I use Markdown all day. I use it because it's easy to mark simple document elements like headers and formatting, it can be scripted so, for example, I can grab the URL of my most recent safari tab and use it to create a properly formatted link using the text I have highlighted with a keyboard shortcut, because I can easily export it to HTML, docx, or PDF depending, and because word processors suck for serious writing.

fenollp• 10 years ago

What is the algorithm behind this? Does it attempts to find 2 similar pages of the same website and generate markdown from the diff of their DOM trees?

troels• 10 years ago

Looks like it runs the page through a readability algorithm. From there, it probably has a pretty straight 1:1 html to markdown mapping.

diggan• 10 years ago

No, it's simply a service/tool that converts a html page into markdown. So let's say you have something like this:

  <h1>Title</h1>
  <p>Some wordy stuff <a href="example.com">with a link</a>

It would convert it into

  # Title

  Some wordy stuff [example.com](with a link)

laurent123456• 10 years ago

For his own website I'm only getting:

    [Source](http://fuckyeahmarkdown.com/ "Permalink to Fuck Yeah Markdown")

    # Fuck Yeah Markdown

jordanwallwork• 10 years ago

Why on earth don't people test these things on their own websites to make sure the output is good?? There was another thing on HN the other day (I think it was websites -> word docs or something) and it half-assed it's own homepage.

When faced with an address box for something like this where I can enter any url I want my mind always immediately goes blank and I just copy the current address in to see what happens, I'm sure I can't be the only one

Kiro2• 10 years ago

my mind always immediately goes blank and I just copy the current address in to see what happens, I'm sure I can't be the only one

No, I'm exactly the same.

aethertron2• 10 years ago

It's not meant for that sort of webpage. It's meant for articles, blogs, etc. not apps. Like this site itself.

That's probably why they didn't bother to make it work properly on itself.

Kiro2• 10 years ago

First thing I tested as well.

Horba• 10 years ago

I feel validated that my markup must be sane considering a generic utility can parse the html into markdown.

_nalply2• 10 years ago

It works on Quora articles even with math formulas. I'm going to use this tool to export my own Quora content. Thanks a lot for the pointer!

_nalply2• 10 years ago

Except for images. I'm going to tell the creator. He said: «If you have a specific page you think should be Markdownifiable, send it to me. I’ll see what I can do.»

sandGorgon2• 10 years ago

this is potentially a big idea. there are hundreds of jobs on upwork "convert my old wordpress site to markdown/jekyll" or "convert my old drupal site to markdown/jekyll".

even if you manage to convert a wordpress site to jekyll (with all images, formatting,etc)... you are onto something big.

I would pay 20-30$ for a one time conversion of a few dozen pages.

pmlnr2• 10 years ago

    for p in *.html; do 
        pandoc -p -f html -t markdown-raw_html-native_divs-native_spans -o"${p/.html/.md}" "${p}"; 
    done

sandGorgon2• 10 years ago

none of these (including the importrb one) is seamless. you have to install ruby, you have to install pandoc..etc

what you want is a way where you point to a github account and wordpress site... and 5 minutes later, your github pages are filled with your blog pages . All nicely formatted and with all images.

oftenwrong• 10 years ago

http://import.jekyllrb.com/

jordanlev• 10 years ago

Or how about just a "static site" (html files):

  wget -m -k -K -E -p http://example.com

bronlund2• 10 years ago

Bah. It can't even do http://www.arngren.net/

ddmf• 10 years ago

That makes me think of http://www.lingscars.com/ - which actually marks down ok.

bronlund2• 10 years ago

:D Awesome

alex_hitchins• 10 years ago

I highly recommend you view source on LingsCards.com.

AndrewVos• 10 years ago

Cool, then you can put them directly into my new app: https://anmo.io :)

pmlnr2• 10 years ago

Pandoc[1] as service?

[1] http://pandoc.org/

fiatjaf• 10 years ago

Output is not good at all for http://fiatjaf.on.flowi.es/, which the simplest HTML I could get.

emillon• 10 years ago

You might want to filter local and unroutable URLs, for example entering 127.0.0.1 renders a MAMP Pro page.

stevekemp2• 10 years ago

I reported the same thing, directly to the author.

arcatek• 10 years ago

And two days later, their phpmyadmin is still publicly available ...

upofadown• 10 years ago

Is this better than pandoc?

xyzzy4• 10 years ago

Why do front-end engineers like to use the word "fuck" so much? Just something I've noticed over time.

akent• 10 years ago

Fuck knows.

leeoniya• 10 years ago

i made this a few years ago:

https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js

tammer• 10 years ago

I want something like that's halfway between links/w3m & readability/reader view - basically a version of readability that's an actual browser.

Maybe one day lightweight design will be trendy.

lj3• 10 years ago

I tried this years ago (it's been around for quite some time) and found better results with his Marker[0] bookmarklet. It only converts whatever is selected on the page. It eliminates 1 out of the 2 issues I had with markdownifier, which is it's inability to figure out what to keep and what not to keep on the page.

The second issue I have affects both. Neither locally downloads linked content. Not having the images come down with the article means if the article were to go away, your local copy would be worthless unless you manually saved those pictures and altered the links pointing to them.

[0] http://brettterpstra.com/2013/12/22/marker-web-selections-to...

VOYD• 10 years ago

why?

stevekemp2• 10 years ago

Remember when you're writing applications like this, which accept an URL, you need to filter out `file://` URIs.

Otherwise you disclose arbitrary files, like this site does.

Turns websites into Markdown

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