alexkarle.com

Source for alexkarle.com
git clone git://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com.git
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commit 196eed4cde955aee098091b003e65ddf17e4d004 (patch)
parent bc30df3a6debdf21b3d0d0b62142e34aaaedac32
Author: Alex Karle <alex@alexkarle.com>
Date:   Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:38:30 -0400

text-only: Add new blog post announcing text.alexkarle.com

This was a fun blog post to write. It started off hyper technical,
discussing the way I was using timestamp files to circumnavigate the
no-subdirectory limitation of the inference rules... and of course while
writing it I realized I should just replace it with an install target.

So I had to scrap half of what was written and rewrite it. And in doing
so I realized the technical bits weren't nearly as interesting as why I
would ever bother doing this in the first place, so this post became
much more WHY and less HOW.

Diffstat:
MLINKS | 1+
MORDER | 1+
Mblog.7 | 3+++
Atext-only.7 | 84+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4 files changed, 89 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/LINKS b/LINKS @@ -5,3 +5,4 @@ pass.1 https://www.passwordstore.org newsboat.1 https://newsboat.org stagit.1 https://git.codemadness.org/stagit/ git-daemon.1 https://git-scm.com/docs/git-daemon +gophernicus.8 https://gophernicus.org diff --git a/ORDER b/ORDER @@ -12,3 +12,4 @@ 107-my-old-man.txt 108-use-feeds.txt 109-creative-coding.txt +110-text-only.txt diff --git a/blog.7 b/blog.7 @@ -18,6 +18,9 @@ Otherwise, posts below are from newest to oldest: .Pp .Bl -bullet -compact .It +.Xr text-only 7 +- announcing text.alexkarle.com (09/20/2021) +.It .Xr creative-coding 7 - learning through creative limitation (07/18/2021) .It diff --git a/text-only.7 b/text-only.7 @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +.Dd September 20, 2021 +.Dt TEXT-ONLY 7 +.Os +.Sh NAME +.Nm text-only +.Nd announcing text.alexkarle.com +.Sh DESCRIPTION +This past week I rolled out +.Lk https://text.alexkarle.com , +and I wanted to write a little bit about it! +.Ss WHAT +text.alexkarle.com is a text-only ascii dump of this entire site. +It's served over HTTP, HTTPS, and Gopher to provide a wide array +of options for accessing the content. +.Ss WHY +I'm a huge fan of the "small internet" and lightweight sites in general. +Although I'm not an active participant in any of the tilde communities, +I really appreciate the commitment to plaintext, *NIX, and simple software. +.Pp +At some point in my browsing of the tildeverse, +I stumbled across Gopher and took a liking to the simple protocol. +Surfing gopherspace is so awesomely fast and simple compared to +the slow, ad-filled, modern web. +Better yet, it's totally removed from the commercialization of the internet. +No one is serving content on Gopher to make money. +It's full of art and real, empathetic, humans. +.Pp +For my own part, +I started serving an ascii dump of the +.Xr mdoc 7 +content on this site over Gopher (via +.Xr gophernicus 8 ) +almost 7 months ago. +However, I was never really happy with how it was organized or generated +(hence the lack of an announcement on the +.Xr blog 7 ) . +.Pp +It was the discovery of a fellow +.Xr mdoc 7 +website over at +.Lk https://text.causal.agency +that inspired me to revisit my approach to publishing a text-only +version of this site. +I finally replaced the scripted afterthought of a gopher +publisher with a first class build target +and decided to expand the offering from gopher-only to HTTP(S). +I figured someone might prefer to browse it that way +(maybe retro computing enthusiasts?), +and with +.Xr httpd 8 +already running, it came basically for free! +.Ss HOW +I started to write about all the "challenges" I faced in this process, +but really these were all self-imposed problems from restricting myself +to a POSIX subset of BSD +.Xr make 1 +(in the name of +.Xr creative-coding 7 ) . +I think had I chosen either BSD make with extensions or GNU make, +the build would have been much cleaner, +but with a couple of hacks it's okay as is. +.Pp +Maybe I'll write about it someday, +but it didn't feel worth holding up this "announcement". +The TL;DR: I added another inference rule for *.7 -> *.txt and +moved from a "build in tree" model (where the source tree was what was served by +.Xr httpd 8 ) +to a "run the install target after build" model. +The latter is necessary because POSIX inference rules only build into the +current directory and I don't want text.alexkarle.com users to see the *.html +there too. +.Pp +Of course, if you're curious to see how the bits come together, +I publish all of the site source at +.Lk https://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com ! +.Sh SEE ALSO +.Bl -bullet -compact +.It +.Xr blog 7 +.It +.Xr my-old-man 7 +.It +.Xr gophernicus 8 +.El