text-only.txt (2951B) [raw]
1 # text-only: Announcing text.alexkarle.com 2 3 _Published: September 20, 2021_ 4 5 This past week I rolled out [https://text.alexkarle.com], and I 6 wanted to write a little bit about it! 7 8 ## What 9 10 text.alexkarle.com is a text-only ascii dump of this entire site. 11 It's served over HTTP, HTTPS, and Gopher to provide a wide array of 12 options for accessing the content. 13 14 ## Why 15 16 I'm a huge fan of the "small internet" and lightweight sites in 17 general. Although I'm not an active participant in any of the 18 tilde communities, I really appreciate the commitment to plaintext, 19 \*NIX, and simple software. 20 21 At some point in my browsing of the tildeverse, I stumbled across 22 Gopher and took a liking to the simple protocol. Surfing 23 gopherspace is so awesomely fast and simple compared to the slow, 24 ad-filled, modern web. Better yet, it's totally removed from the 25 commercialization of the internet. No one is serving content on 26 Gopher to make money. It's full of art and real, empathetic, 27 humans. 28 29 For my own part, I started serving an ascii dump of the `mdoc(7)` 30 content on this site over Gopher (via 31 [`gophernicus(8)`](https://gophernicus.org)) almost 7 months ago. 32 However, I was never really happy with how it was organized or 33 generated (hence the lack of an announcement on the `blog(7)`). 34 35 It was the discovery of a fellow `mdoc(7)` website over at 36 [https://text.causal.agency] that inspired me to revisit my approach 37 to publishing a text-only version of this site. I finally replaced 38 the scripted afterthought of a gopher publisher with a first class 39 build target and decided to expand the offering from gopher-only to 40 HTTP(S). I figured someone might prefer to browse it that way 41 (maybe retro computing enthusiasts?), and with `httpd(8)` already 42 running, it came basically for free! 43 44 ## How 45 46 I started to write about all the "challenges" I faced in this 47 process, but really these were all self-imposed problems from 48 restricting myself to a POSIX subset of BSD `make(1)` (in the name of 49 [creative coding](creative-coding.html)). I think had I chosen either BSD make with 50 extensions or GNU make, the build would have been much cleaner, but 51 with a couple of hacks it's okay as is. 52 53 Maybe I'll write about it someday, but it didn't feel worth holding 54 up this "announcement". The TL;DR: I added another inference rule 55 for `*.7` -> `*.txt` and moved from a "build in tree" model (where the 56 source tree was what was served by `httpd(8)`) to a "run the install 57 target after build" model. The latter is necessary because POSIX 58 inference rules only build into the current directory and I don't 59 want text.alexkarle.com users to see the `*.html` there too. 60 61 Of course, if you're curious to see how the bits come together, I 62 publish all of the site source at 63 [https://sr.ht/~akarle/alexkarle.com]! 64 65 ## Update 66 67 As of November 15, 2021, text.alexkarle.com was moved entirely to 68 gopher. See [this blog post](/blog/burrowing.html) for more info. 69 70 [Back to blog](/blog)