Telegram Blog

Telegram "extra info" and Templates, June 11, 2012

Each Telegram page may contain extra info. Extra info is information about either the page or the whole Telegram site, but it is not displayed on the page.

You can define extra info by placing colon-separated values at the top of the page. For example:

title: My Fun Page
date: 2012/08/14
    
# This is my page
    
Blah blah blah 

You can separate the extra info with an optional line of dashes:

----------
title: My Fun Page
date: 2012/08/14
----------
    
# This is my page
    
blah blah blah

You can also include the extra info as Markdown references. This format makes the page look prettier in Markdown preview mode:

# This is my page
    
[title=My Fun Page]: /
    
blah blah blah
    
[date: 2012/08/14]: /

Telegram (based on Hoisted) currently supports the following extra info:

• template_url: The template to use to render the site. This value is the public URL of a Git directory that houses the template. For example:
  template_url: https://github.com/telegr-am/template-base.git
  Which points the base Telegram template. You can point Telegram to your template by hosting your template in a public GitHub repository. You can fork the default template. This extra info is global to the whole site.
• path: The place to put the current file. For example:
  path: /my_info/about
  
• serve: Should the current file be placed on the web site? For example:
  serve: false
• valid_from: The date the the file is valid from. Before the date, the page will not be served. For example:
  valid_from: 2012/06/20
• valid_to: The date the the file is valid to. After the date, the page will not be served. For example:
  valid_to: 2012/06/28 14:45
• title: The title of the page. For example:
  title: David's wicked cool stuff!
• menu: The entry in the menu for this page (if this is not specified, the filename will be used):
  menu: Special Sauce
• order: The order of the page in the menu (sorted by number so having a gap in the numbers lets you insert a menu entry between others):
  order: 200
• site_title: The name of your site (this is global to the whole site, so you only have tp put it in one file):
  site_title: Dpp's amazing stuff
• post: Is this a blog post (it will be treated specially… also files in the _posts directory are automatically considered blog posts):
  post: true
• event: Is the page an event (events are treated specially… also, files in the _events directory are automatically considered events):
  event: true
• blog_root: The root directory where all blog posts will be output:
  blog_root: /blog

You can create your own template by forking https://github.com/telegr-am/template-base and then changing the template and pointing your Telegram site to your new public Git repository with the template_url directive. The file that defines the template is /templates-hidden/default.html. Just edit that file. It contains Lift snippet invocations (which I will document in a few days).

Hope this gets you started.

Rock and roll!

-- David