Phlogging Setup

2019-10-02 15:47

I now have a working phlog. Exciting! It's also available via RSS1, on the web2 and, er, on the web via RSS3.

The first version was all fancy, with a gophermap file for each entry. This looked good and allowed for handy stuff like navigation links, but it felt a bit off, as if I were trying to use gopher as a wonky version of the web. (Also, writing gophermaps is rather fiddly and I kept making mistakes.)

So, I switched to a simple setup: each post is a text file, spiced up with some basic Markdown and footnote-style reference links. To make posts look pretty, I have vim's formatprg set to par -w56 -j.

To ease the phlogging process, I wrote a little bash script called whip4, which takes a post title as an argument, makes a new text file in the right place, opens it for editing, then adds a link to the post to the phlog's gophermap. (It can also set up a new phlog and at some point soon, it'll generate the alternate versions of the phlog too, like a rubbish tilde.club-specific version of burrow5.)