User Study: Get Help Publishing Your Markdown Content with Docsify-This

The Plaza
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Looking for an easier way to publish your educational or research content online with the upcoming new school term?

I’m looking to assist 2-3 people or teams over the next few weeks in fully leveraging the open-source project https://Docsify-This.net as part of a user research study - you’ll get personalized guidance to streamline your content publishing workflow, and your feedback will help improve the tool for everyone.

Docsify-This is ideal if you have Markdown content you’d like to publish or are interested in exploring a platform-independent publishing workflow - it’s designed for both easy entry and exit, and your content stays in its original location. Happy to use the communications channel of your choice or the HibbittsDesign.org private Discord server.

Want to see an example? Check out the Docsify-This site Open Lab project, a fully documented model robotics lab, at Texas A&M University.

OpenLab project site rendered in Docsify-This includes navigation links on left and photo of an engineering lab on right
OpenLab project site rendered in Docsify-This includes navigation links on left and photo of an engineering lab on right1920×1129 159 KB

If you’re interested or have any questions, feel free to reply here or send me a message - I’d love to chat to learn more!

UPDATE: After a great discussion about Markdown publishing and Docsify-This with an educator in Australia, it occurred to me that my Markdown Publishing with Docsify⁠–⁠This guide might also be a helpful resource to share here.

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More Time Needed for OEAwards Harvest-- Consider the Act of Micro-recognition
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I would hope some of the 1800+ people here would be interested in taking Paul up on this generous offer to assist you in creating not just a dynamic web site, but one that leverages the strength of an open and flexible publication model.

He’s offering this for free! This is a great means to create a dynamic web site reference for a project, a course, even a physical facility like the example above of the engineering lab.

Don’t pass this up! Let @paulhibbitts know your interest by replying below or clicking his @ name right there to send a private message.

Thank you Paul, this is the kind of activity I yearn to see more of here in OEGConnect (I took the liberty of adding the photo and tagging so this shows up on the featured stories on the front entrance).

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Thanks very much @cogdog for the positive feedback and higher visibility of the offer! TBH I was pretty jazzed to already having one educator reach out but the more the better :slightly_smiling_face:

UPDATE #2: To help folks better determine if Docsify-This might be a suitable publishing tool I’ve added this section to the Docsify-This docs (as an open-source author this was a valuable exercise!).

When is Docsify-This a Good Candidate?

Docsify-This often works really well when you:

  • Want to embed the same content across multiple platforms (LMS, websites, etc.)

  • Need cross-platform content reuse (same content for web, mobile, PDF generation)

  • Need to publish content quickly without technical setup

  • Need minimal maintenance publishing (set it and forget it, no server needed)

  • Prefer simple, portable Markdown files with platform independence

  • Are interested in using GitHub/Codeberg for version-control and collaboration

  • Are creating educational materials, documentation, or research content

Other publishing tools might be better candidates when you:

  • Require SEO optimization and search engine discoverability

  • Need complex user management, approval workflows, or interactive features (contact forms, newsletters, user accounts)

  • Want rich media features (e-commerce, forums, booking systems) or extensive visual customization

  • Have multiple content types requiring different layouts (events, products, news, etc.)

  • Are building large, complex websites with hundreds of pages

  • Prefer visual page builders over Markdown editing

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Just another quick update, I’ve now had three educators contact me and right now it looks like Docsify-This could be a good candidate for two of them.

The Docsify-This project is already benefiting from this user research as well! Both of these participants are interested in embedding open Markdown content into another platform (WordPress and/or LMS) and I can see better docs should be available for these scenarios, and so the doc section Embedding Docsify-This Pages into Other Platforms has now been updated for all users to benefit from :rocket:

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Fantastic, Paul. I had to unpack my memories of my old project, but there are ways in WordPress via plugins to enter markdown into the editor (or enable the module in JetPack), not likely the same as pulling from the external source as an iframe does.

But here is another thought for wordpress, as editing / inserting iframe is a bit tedious. You can write a small Wordpress plugin that would allow URLs from say docsify-this.net be automatically embedded if you paste one of its links on a blank line (the way WordPress does this for YouTube videos).

There is a WordPress function to add a new custom source to automatically embed content. I’ve written a few of these,to add support for autoembeds from say Internet Archive Video, Mastodon posts, etc

I might dabble to try to get it working for docsify this - that would mean in wordpress, you need only paste in the URL that generates the content.

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Thanks @cogdog , that sounds intriguing. If you do explore that possibility please DM me and I will share any more info I learn about example WP embed scenarios etc. Also always happy to help out in any way I can!

If anyone else is interested in exploring Docsify-This for sharing/displaying open Markdown content I can take one more person on for the user study - DM or contact me via my https://HibbittsDesign.org site.