Terence Eden posted a collection of websites that post in both HTML and plain text, a nice clutter free way of consuming content.

I started looking into providing the same here and realised that I couldn’t do that while using GitHub pages, so took the opportunity to migrate the site to Mythic Beasts.

Adding plain text to jekyll needs a couple of additional files, and a change to the config file.

This will only generate plain text blog pages, and will create a .txt file for every equivalent blog url:

https://www.kianryan.co.uk/2025-05-15-how-i-stream-video-from-every-old-device-on-my-desk/
https://www.kianryan.co.uk/2025-05-15-how-i-stream-video-from-every-old-device-on-my-desk.txt

  1. Add plaintext.html to _layouts folder.
  2. Add plain_text.rb to _plugins folder.
  3. Add the following to the defaults section under _config.yml
defaults:
  -
    scope:
      path: ""
      type: "plaintext"
    values:
      layout: "plaintext"

On serving your jekyll content, you should now have .txt files extensions to your blog posts.