alexkarle.com

Source for alexkarle.com
git clone git://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com.git
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      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)