Lowering Barriers to Writing ---------------------------- Sun Nov 21 10:21:16 EST 2021 --- Sipping coffee and listening to Psychedelic Swamp on the turntable while Jennie shops online for plants as presents. --- When I moved from mdoc(7) over HTTP to plaintext over Gopher, the barrier to writing became much smaller. No longer did I have to look up the mdoc man page while writing, nor did I have to check how it looked in multiple formats (HTML and ASCII). There were also psychological barriers too--a phlog has less traffic, and the traffic here is maybe less judgey. I feel I can be a bit more open in my writing and worry about the phrasing less. I wanted to make it even easier to "just start writing", so I wrote a small shell script "phlog(1)" that: 1. Takes a title 2. Starts a new entry at the next NNN.txt file available 3. Prepopulates the entry with the title and date 4. Updates the phlog index to include the entry It's in gopher://alexkarle.com/1/code, but I wanted to include it here too, just because I expect it'll morph over time and I want to document the MVP! Some things learned: - `$(())` for arithmetic returns the result, so to avoid executing a number, prefix it with the null operation `:` - ed(1) is awesome for programmatic edits to files --- phlog(1) --- #!/bin/sh # phlog -- lowering the barrier to phlogging # see gopher://alexkarle.com/phlog/011.txt die() { echo "$*" exit 1 } [ -z "$1" ] && die "usage: phlog TITLE" PHLOG=$(dirname "$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")")/phlog i=1 nextfile() { file=$(printf "%03d.txt" $i) : $((i+=1)) } title="$*" underline="$(echo "$title" | sed 's/./-/g')" nextfile while [ -e "$PHLOG/$file" ]; do nextfile done echo "$title" >"$PHLOG/$file" echo "$underline" >>"$PHLOG/$file" date >>"$PHLOG/$file" ed "$PHLOG/index.gph" <