🌀 timeline - create you own social website

Created by sørenpeter (www.darch.dk)

So are you also tired of having to use big tech's social medias to stay connected with friends and interesting people, and having your privacy pried upon?

And are you a creative human, who want back control over you art, music, words, code, instead of having to shoehorn your soul into the grid of blackbox algorithms ?

Then it is you, who I've made timeline for.

🧶 What is timeline and twtxt/yarn?

timeline is a handfull of small files that you upload to a server and access it via a browser. It then gives you an interface for posting words, links (and images too, soon), as well as following other peoples feeds and enganging in conversations by posting replies.

For the social features timeline are using the twtxt format and most of the twtxt Extensions developed in the context of Yarn.social](https://yarn.social/).

timeline also support its own flavor of WebMentions, so it is possible to be notified about @mentions from feeds you are not currently/yet following. You can also search for others feeds using WebFinger, if they got that set up on their server , like it's the case for most yarn.social pods. You can also search for others feeds using WebFinger, if they got that set up on their servser, like it's the case for most yarn.social pods.

My visions for timeline is to bring back the fun and quirkiness of bygone sites such as Geocities of the 1990s and Myspace of the 2000s, that enables creating a personalized place for you to express yourself online and also being able to follow others who inspire you.

At the same time providing a good looking basic design with the help of Simple.css, which allows you to customize the look and feel. Even to the level where timeline aligns with the design of your excsing webpage, like I did on: darch.dk/timeline.

Conversation view with replies / Profile view / Gallery View

🚨 DISCLAIMER / WARNING

I'm not a professional programmer, so this software might lead to data lose or making your website unsecure in unforeseen ways.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

🛠 Installation and setup

0. You need to have a webhosting with PHP 8 and perferable running Apache or similar for timeline to work.

   There are free options, but I would suggest that you pay for your hosting and also get a nice domain, so you have more ownership over your data and online idetenty.

1. Download the code from https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline as a zip

2. Upload the content of the zip to you webhosting using a FTP client

   • The default would be to put eveything from within the timeline-main folder in the root so you will have:

   www.example.net/timeline/            (go here to see your timeline)
   www.example.net/timeline/gallery/    (go here to see your gallery)
   www.example.net/timeline/post/       (go here to post to your feed)
   www.example.net/twtxt.txt            (where you feed lives and other can follow you)
   www.example.net/avatar.png           (your pretty picture)
   

   • or you can rename the folder timeline to something else

3. Go to the private folder and make a copy of config_template.ini and save it as config.ini

4. Open config.ini and edit the setting to you liking and setup

5. Open up www.example.net/timeline/ in your browser and check for any errors

Webfinger endpoint setup

6. For allowing others to look you on using webfinger, you need to move the .well-known folder from within the _webfinger_endpoint to the root of your domain, so it is accesable from www.example.net/.well-know/webfinger

7. You also need to edit the index.php file wihtin the .well-know/webfinger folder and set the correct path for you timeline installation in $timeline_dir variable.

🎨 Customization

• Upload your own avatar.png (can also be a .jpg or .gif)

  • Edit your twtxt.txt and config.ini with the correct path

• Copy custom_template.css to custom.css and try changinge the coloers to you liking

TODO

🐞 Bugs to fix

• (2024-11-30) Fix issues with parsing markdown vs. twtxt syntax (replaceed slimdown with Parsedown, supporting lists, block quotes, code/blocks, links, images)

🚀 Features to code

• Make profile the default view, if user is not logged in (redo routing code)

• UI for uploading images

• UI buttoms for markdown when making post

• Backend: Thumbnail cache support, to avoid loading all images in full resolution when viewing a gallery

🙏 Credits / shoutouts

Ideas and inspiration

• twtxt - The original decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers

• yarn.social - The multi-user pods allowed everyone to use twtxt as a social media without selfhosting

• groovy-twtxt - A curated list of groovy twtxt-related projects

Code by others

• twtxt-php - A minimalistic and personal PHP site for your twtxt microblogging.

• Slimdown - A simple regex-based Markdown parser in PHP.

• Tag cloud feature is based on php code by Domingos Faria