Welcome to TTL!
Hello all visitors! My name is Ethan Marlatt and I am the creator of TTL. The inspiration behind this experiment came from a dual desire for both long-form, deliberate content and knowing the ins-and-outs of what a platform like this would look like on the technical side. I was finding the TikTokification of all social media disheartening and wanted a way to reconnect with, at the least, the people in my circle and see posts that were engaging because they mattered to me... not because they were designed to be by engagement-farming A.I. bots. That's enough about me (unless you want to hear more, in which case email me I am seeking employment), let's talk about TTL...


TTL
TTL is a fully-featured, multi-user, blog platform. Anything you'd expect from a blogging platform, you can do on TTL and more.

As stated earlier, TTL was created with long-form content in mind and as such has a number of features geared toward this. The first of these features is versions.

Versions allows you to take a snapshot of your blog post at a certain point in time and return to it as you please. Have you ever been working on a long project and by the end of it had a list of files looking something like...
draft_1.pdf
draft_2.pdf
draft_final.pdf
draft_FINAL_FINAL.pdf
draft_ACTUALFINAL_USETHISONE.pdf
Consider this your blogging equivalent to let you revise, change your mind, pick up where you left off, revisit abandoned ideas, remember why they were abandoned in the first place, etc.

The next feature is the editor itself. The editor is a modified markdown implementation made possible by my custom implementation—Marquis—tailored specifically to TTL. The markdown editor allows one to really focus on the writing. Formatting is great and that is why previewing your formatted post is so accessible, but when writing, it can often distract from the content itself. Especially with images, it is easy to get lost in the aesthetic. Markdown lets you take note of the formatting in a way that is conducive to productivity by seamlessly integrating it as plaintext. Markdown may have a steeper learning curve than other rich WYSIWYG text editors, but I personally find that it makes me a more efficient writer after spending a lot of time with it.

The custom part of the implementation refers to the footnote system in which images are handled. Images are typically handled in markdown by referencing the full URL, which can serve to clutter the text by providing a contextless string of letters in the middle of your work. TTL allows you to assign your images custom labels, rather than displaying urls, that are referenced footnote-style below your post.

Other features I would like to point out are the nested comments and notifications that while ubiquitous in most applications, were fun puzzles for me from a technical perspective to sort out.

Parting Note
TTL is an ongoing project and I hope to continuously improve it every chance I get. For now, it serves its purpose as a minimum viable product for me and my friends. I would love to hear any feedback you have on what can be improved. If you made it this far thank you. Now get to posting!