There are two kinds of posts:

Status

The default, add some words into the textarea and press the publish button. Any markdown is valid.

Any tags are automatically linked to tag archives.

Select some text and paste a link over it to turn the selection into a markdown link, e.g. selecting Lamb and pasting https://example.com produces [Lamb](https://example.com).

Add images by dragging files onto the editor, or by pasting an image straight from the clipboard (for example a screenshot). Either way the image is uploaded and a markdown image link is inserted at the cursor. JPEG and PNG uploads are automatically converted to WebP to keep files small; GIF, WebP, and AVIF are stored as-is.

Permalinks for statuses are in the form of /status/<integer>.

This is a status post #hello

Task lists

Write GitHub-style task lists with - [ ] for an open item and - [x] for a done one:

- [ ] buy milk
- [x] walk the dog

These render as real checkboxes. When you are logged in the checkboxes are interactive: tick or untick one straight on the page and Lamb saves it as an edit, rewriting the [ ]/[x] in the post source for you. Visitors see the checkboxes as read-only.

Page

This is a status plus YAML-parsed front-matter, this is metadata and will not be rendered.

---
title: About me
---

Hi I'm John Sheeple and the example author of this site.

You don’t have to write front-matter by hand: if a post has no title: but its body opens with a top-level Markdown heading, Lamb treats that heading as the title. Writing

# About me

Hi I'm John Sheeple and the example author of this site.

is the same as the front-matter version above — Lamb moves the heading into a title: for you, so the title isn’t also repeated as a heading inside the post. Any leading heading level works (# through ######); the first heading is the title whatever level you typed. A heading that isn’t the very first line is left in place as a section.

Slugs for pages are derived from the title on creation unless you explicitly provide slug: in the front-matter. The slug for the example above is about-me and the permalink is /about-me.

Headings inside a post body are levelled to fit beneath the post title automatically, so the page outline stays in order (the post title is a heading, and your body headings sit one level below it).

Editing the slug: line (or the title, when no explicit slug is set) reslugs the post, and Lamb automatically stores a 301 redirect from the old slug — good URLs don’t change, so bookmarks and inbound links keep working. See Redirections.

Slugs are unique. If a slug is already taken by another post (or matches a built-in route like /search), Lamb appends the post’s id to keep the URL distinct, and writes the final slug back into the post’s front-matter so you can see — and edit — the slug the post is actually served under.

You can also set a created: date in the front-matter. A future date schedules the post — see Scheduling.

Front-matter keys are forgiving: they are matched case-insensitively, and underscores and dashes are interchangeable. So Title, title, in_reply_to and in-reply-to all work — handy on mobile keyboards that auto-capitalise the first letter of a line.

iOS note: iOS “Smart Punctuation” rewrites a typed --- into em/en dashes (for example —-). Lamb recognises a mangled opening and closing fence and restores it to --- automatically — whether you add the front-matter when first writing the post or by editing it later — so front-matter still works from an iPhone or iPad. If you’d rather type plain dashes everywhere, turn the feature off under Settings → General → Keyboard → Smart Punctuation.

System types

The following sections of the site are special:

  • /tags/<name> are tags linked in content
  • /search/<keywords> search the content for keywords
  • /login and /logout to login and out.
  • /feed for the Atom newsfeed.
  • Media: Add images by drag-and-drop or paste; JPEG/PNG are converted to WebP.
  • Drafts: Add draft: true to front-matter to save a post as a draft.
  • Scheduling: Add a future created: date to publish a post later.
  • Menu Items: Page posts with slugs can be pinned as menu items.
  • Reply posts: Add in-reply-to: to front-matter to mark a post as a reply to another URL.
  • Syntax Highlighting: Fenced code blocks with a language hint are highlighted server-side.
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