text-only.7 (3016B) [raw]
1 .Dd September 20, 2021 2 .Dt TEXT-ONLY 7 3 .Os 4 .Sh NAME 5 .Nm text-only 6 .Nd announcing text.alexkarle.com 7 .Sh DESCRIPTION 8 This past week I rolled out 9 .Lk https://text.alexkarle.com , 10 and I wanted to write a little bit about it! 11 .Ss WHAT 12 text.alexkarle.com is a text-only ascii dump of this entire site. 13 It's served over HTTP, HTTPS, and Gopher to provide a wide array 14 of options for accessing the content. 15 .Ss WHY 16 I'm a huge fan of the "small internet" and lightweight sites in general. 17 Although I'm not an active participant in any of the tilde communities, 18 I really appreciate the commitment to plaintext, *NIX, and simple software. 19 .Pp 20 At some point in my browsing of the tildeverse, 21 I stumbled across Gopher and took a liking to the simple protocol. 22 Surfing gopherspace is so awesomely fast and simple compared to 23 the slow, ad-filled, modern web. 24 Better yet, it's totally removed from the commercialization of the internet. 25 No one is serving content on Gopher to make money. 26 It's full of art and real, empathetic, humans. 27 .Pp 28 For my own part, 29 I started serving an ascii dump of the 30 .Xr mdoc 7 31 content on this site over Gopher (via 32 .Xr gophernicus 8 ) 33 almost 7 months ago. 34 However, I was never really happy with how it was organized or generated 35 (hence the lack of an announcement on the 36 .Xr blog 7 ) . 37 .Pp 38 It was the discovery of a fellow 39 .Xr mdoc 7 40 website over at 41 .Lk https://text.causal.agency 42 that inspired me to revisit my approach to publishing a text-only 43 version of this site. 44 I finally replaced the scripted afterthought of a gopher 45 publisher with a first class build target 46 and decided to expand the offering from gopher-only to HTTP(S). 47 I figured someone might prefer to browse it that way 48 (maybe retro computing enthusiasts?), 49 and with 50 .Xr httpd 8 51 already running, it came basically for free! 52 .Ss HOW 53 I started to write about all the "challenges" I faced in this process, 54 but really these were all self-imposed problems from restricting myself 55 to a POSIX subset of BSD 56 .Xr make 1 57 (in the name of 58 .Xr creative-coding 7 ) . 59 I think had I chosen either BSD make with extensions or GNU make, 60 the build would have been much cleaner, 61 but with a couple of hacks it's okay as is. 62 .Pp 63 Maybe I'll write about it someday, 64 but it didn't feel worth holding up this "announcement". 65 The TL;DR: I added another inference rule for *.7 -> *.txt and 66 moved from a "build in tree" model (where the source tree was what was served by 67 .Xr httpd 8 ) 68 to a "run the install target after build" model. 69 The latter is necessary because POSIX inference rules only build into the 70 current directory and I don't want text.alexkarle.com users to see the *.html 71 there too. 72 .Pp 73 Of course, if you're curious to see how the bits come together, 74 I publish all of the site source at 75 .Lk https://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com ! 76 .Sh UPDATE 77 As of November 15, 2021, text.alexkarle.com was moved entirely to gopher. 78 See 79 .Xr burrowing 7 80 for more info. 81 .Sh SEE ALSO 82 .Bl -bullet -compact 83 .It 84 .Xr blog 7 85 .It 86 .Xr my-old-man 7 87 .It 88 .Xr gophernicus 8 89 .El