IPMD is a system for creating and publishing decentralized websites using GitHub and DagDB.

You can publish markdown content as well as structured data attached to each page. You can also follow and repost pages from other sites into your "feed."

IPMD is like a hybrid between a blog, personal wiki, a social network like twitter or facebook, and an old fashioned webring.

You can create new pages wherever you like on your site. These pages are published as soon as you push them to GitHub. You can then decide to broadcast the creation or update of any page to your "feed."

You can also follow other IPMD sites. GitHub Actions will pull the database of each of those sites into your site, presenting a unified feed of all the sites you follow.

First, create a git repository locally and on GitHub.

$ mkdir newsite
$ git init
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/{username}/{repo}.git

You need to have a repository that has its remote origin set because we need to use GitHub's LFS service as a block store for your site's database.

We'll also end up using GitHub Actions for building and publishing your site and for regularly pulling the feeds of the sites that you follow.

Next, initialize IPMD.

$ npx ipmd init

You'll be prompted for a GitHub Personal Access Token which will then be cached in a local .auth file. Several other base files will be created, including a .gitignore that will ignore the .auth file. If you have your own .gitignore make sure you avoid checking in the .auth file since it contains you private authentication token.

Finally, you'll need to check everthing in infor it to be published.

$ git add -A
$ git commit -m "init: setting up ipmd"