Write your first post
This tutorial walks you through your first ten minutes with Lamb: logging in, publishing a status, adding a hashtag and an image, turning a post into a page, and saving a draft. Follow it start to finish and you will have used every part of the writing flow once.
It assumes Lamb is already installed and running. If it isn’t, start with Installation & hosting.
Log in
Go to /login and enter your password. Lamb has a single author — you — so there is no username. Once you are in, the homepage gains a text box at the top. Everything below happens from there.
Publish a status
Type a sentence into the box and press Publish. That’s a status post, and it’s already live at its own address, /status/<number>.
The box takes Markdown, so **bold**, _italic_, and - lists all work. You don’t need any of it for a status — plain text is a complete post — but it’s there when you want it.
Add a hashtag
Write a word with a # in front of it, like #coffee, anywhere in a post. Lamb turns it into a link automatically. Publish the post, then select the hashtag: it takes you to /tag/coffee, an archive of every post with that tag. Tags are lower-cased in the link, so #Coffee and #coffee land on the same archive.
You don’t create tags anywhere — writing one is enough.
Drag in an image
Drag an image file from your desktop onto the text box. Lamb uploads it and drops a Markdown image link at your cursor, so you can keep typing around it. Pasting an image from the clipboard — a screenshot, say — does the same thing, as does the attach button next to the text box, which is the easiest way to add a photo from a phone.
JPEG and PNG files are re-encoded to WebP on upload to keep them small; the link points at the converted file. GIF, WebP, and AVIF are kept as they are. For the full picture, including video and size limits, see Media.
Turn a post into a page
So far every post has been a status with an automatic /status/<number> address. To make a lasting page instead — an about page, say — give it a title in front matter at the very top of the box:
---
title: About me
---
I write about coffee and code.
Publish it, and the post becomes a page with a readable address built from its title, like /about-me, instead of a numbered status. Front matter is metadata: the title block itself isn’t shown in the post body. Post Types covers the difference in full.
Save a draft
To hold a post back instead of publishing it, add draft: true to the front matter:
---
draft: true
---
Still thinking about this one.
The post is saved but not shown on your blog. Every draft is listed at /drafts while you are logged in, each with an Edit link to finish it and a Preview link you can share with someone who isn’t logged in. See Drafts for how previews and their expiring links work.
Where to go next
You have now published a status, tagged it, added an image, made a page, and saved a draft. Each of those has a reference page with the details this tutorial skipped:
- Post Types — statuses, pages, task lists, and front matter.
- Media — images and video, formats, and upload limits.
- Drafts — drafts, previews, and shareable links.
- Scheduling — publish a post at a future date.
- Reply posts — reply to another page and join the conversation.