ORTSZEIT · DOCS · GETTING STARTED

Getting started

Everything below happens in the web editor at accounts.ortszeit.app. The mobile apps are not out yet; when they are, they do the same things with the camera roll in reach.

Create a blog

You get one blog, and it lives at a subdomain you choose:

https://<your-name>.ortszeit.app/

The rules for that name:

• 3 to 32 characters
• lowercase letters, digits and hyphens only
• it has to start and end with a letter or a digit
• a list of reserved names is blocked — www, api, admin, docs, map, places and about sixty others the platform uses or might use

The name is yours to keep, and a paid plan can point a custom domain at the same blog.

Write a post

The editor is a title field, a text area, and a photo picker. The title is optional — short posts often do not want one, and a post without a title is a first-class post rather than a broken one.

The body is markdown, but only a deliberate subset of it:

Nothing else renders. No headings, no tables, no embedded images, no raw HTML — the markdown is parsed with those rules switched off and the result is sanitised afterwards, so pasting HTML in does not smuggle it through. Links you write are marked nofollow, which is what keeps a free blogging platform from becoming a link farm.

There is no categories field, no tags field, no featured image and no SEO panel. A post is words, photographs, a place and a time.

The body has a soft cap of 5,000 characters. It is soft on purpose: the shape this is built for is three to ten lines written the same evening.

Photos, and where the date comes from

Attach photos and Ortszeit reads each file’s EXIF data as it arrives:

• the capture time — DateTimeOriginal
• the GPS coordinates, if the camera recorded them

The post’s publication time then defaults to the earliest photo’s capture time, not the upload time. This matters more than it sounds: people write up Tuesday on Friday, and the timeline should say Tuesday, because that is when they were there.

Photos taken without location data are fine. They simply carry no coordinates, and the post can still have a place set by hand.

Places

Coordinates are turned into a named place — and then shown to you for confirmation before anything is attached. Nothing is attached silently. A wrong place is worse than no place, so the confirm step is not skippable.

Places are identified by their OpenStreetMap type and id, which is why an exported place still means something outside Ortszeit.

Trips

A trip is an ordered run of posts: a title, a start date, an optional end date. Posts inside a trip are ordered by their date, and the route on the trip page is drawn from their places in that order.

• A post does not have to belong to a trip.
• A trip can be closed when you get home. Closed trips stay editable.
• Free plans get 3 trips; paid plans are unlimited.

Drafts and publishing

A post is a draft until you publish it. Drafts are private, they are included in your export, and everything an import brings in arrives as a draft — nothing publishes itself.

Published posts appear immediately at:

/                      newest posts first
/<trip-slug>/          one trip, with its route
/<trip-slug>/<post>/   a single post
/archive/              every post, chronologically
/map/                  every post with coordinates, on one map
/feed/                 RSS
/feed.json             JSON Feed

One thing to expect

A new blog is not indexed by search engines until it has been reviewed by a human. This is the anti-spam measure that keeps the platform’s shared reputation intact, it is checked in batches, and it does not stop you writing or stop anyone reading the blog — it only holds the search engines off for a little while.