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:
| M | LINKS | | | 1 | + |
| M | ORDER | | | 1 | + |
| M | blog.7 | | | 3 | +++ |
| A | text-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
