The NOSTERIIHI preparatory project has launched two web publishing initiatives as GitHub repositories. They aim at reducing WWW production costs to a minimum.
- A concise Markdown guide written at the GitHub site
- An outline for Markdown web page production
So improving WWW publishing capabilities of villages in Kuhmo is one of the aims of the NOSTERIIHI project. The cooperative's own website at nettinoste.fi is being produced on the open-source WordPress platform.
Web pages are most often authored as text with some HTML style markup. HTML is an excellent tool for authoring and publishing tasks. It can even be used to provide intricate hypertext functionality and to render the fine style nuances required in printed publications.
So HTML allows for very detailed page markup. But using it can be difficult — especially for laypeople, who wouldn’t like to acquire the necessary technical expertise. For this reason, publication pages are usually delivered in tools that hide the details of HTML. The WordPress platform provides such a word processing program.
Markdown
The cooperative has switched to the concise Markdown language in producing its website content. Markdown has only archaic style definition capabilities. Simplicity is achieved by relying on a reduced set marking elements. That is what the name Markdown signals: The new tool turns upside down the ‘Markup’ in ‘Hypertext Markup Language’ (HTML).
WordPress nowadays also supports Markdown editing and preview functionality. Markdown is a quickly learnt document markup language that can be used for a variety of tasks: taking daily notes, publishing web pages, defining text styles for E-mail messages, maintaining to-do lists, etc.
The appearance of an article is defined by easy-to-learn markup. Have a look at this example:
Examples of Markdown markup
- Article subheadings are produced using ## marks
- A content dividing horizontal line is created using three or more hyphens ---
- Underlining is used to underline content that the author would like to emphasize
- Asterisks or numbers are used to produce lists
The various Markup methods listed can be distinguished from the rest of the text by closing the code section with three backticks: ```. The example Markup would then look like this:
## Examples of Markdown markup
---
* Article subheadings are produced with ## marks
* Column dividers are created with three or more hyphens ---
* Underlining is used to _underline_ content that the author would like to emphasize
* *-asterisks or numbers are used to produce lists
The cooperative's NOSTERIIHI project created a Markdown guide in English on the GitHub developer platform. In addition to easy web production procedures, the cooperative also supports internationalism. Our readers can be confident that, a parallel Finnish version of the Markdown guide will be prepared in spring 2025.
The next section explains how a flexible reading experience can be a achieved.
Web publishing in multiple languages
In this article, we are experimenting with a new, easy-going language switching mechanism. At the top of this article, you can locate two language badges: ja . They can be used to easily switch between content published in Finnish and English.
As you can see from the cooperative's Markdown guide and from this article, enabling internationalism is one of the aims of the NOSTERIIHI project.
The cooperative aims to support member villages located in the village network. We will produce a platform that enables free WWW publishing for the home pages of each village.
NOSTERIIHI has prepared plans so that Markdown pages would be converted to HTML on the fly. The pages will be published on a lightweight and reliable WWW platform, where Markdown text is transparently converted to a HTML web page.
This lightweight machinery makes it possible for communication between houses in villages and home automation to work even when all other communication connections have been cut off. This demanding task has also been prepared on the GitHub platform. Have a quick look at the Markdown guide to form an idea what the work looks like from the developer’s perspective. – Can GitHub co-authoring and versioning perhaps be useful for rural developers who would like to cooperate over the net?
The new functionality complements emergency services with neighborly assistance of the information society era. The outline of the first phase of can be found under the GitHub title MarkdownProduction.
It should also be mentioned that NOSTERIIHI has also produced a proposal of municipally supplied domain names. This measure will increase village safety with ease of administration and cost efficiency.
The cooperative's NOSTERIIHI project and its Smart Rural 27 column serve as examples of how the so-called ‘digital gap’ can be reduced. There is no point in hiding problems behind complex terminology, when things are understandable even when presented simply.
To put it plainly: There is no need to refer to digital gaps. We should rather speak of the inability of service providers to meet the needs of elderly and disabled people.
Through this little study, you have hopefully understood that writing WWW pages can actually be rather easy and sometimes in includes even a little bit of fun.