How to MakeStuff (blogging)
Today the computer curmudgeon talks about how he blogs.
I think it's widely known that I update this journal (and by that I mean both my Dreamwidth journal, which you are probably reading now, and my Computer Curmudgeon website), using a rickety combination of shell scripts and makefiles called MakeStuff. There are several good reasons for that. (Whether "because I can" is a good reason or not is debatable. There are others.)
A little over a year ago I made a planning post, and the "Where I am now" section remains a pretty good, albeit sketchy, description of the process. There's also an even sketchier one in the README file for MakeStuff/blogging. It had a list of what I wanted to do next, but essentially the only thing I've actually done is posting in either HTML or Markdown.
I have, however, reorganized things a bit, so that all of the relevant scripts are in MakeStuff/blogging -- the last part was moving in the script, now called charm-wrapper, that takes the post's metadata out of its email-like header and turns it into a command line for charm, a livejournal/dreamwidth posting client written in Python. It isn't a very good solution, but it works.
And since I'm running out of time to make a post today, I'm going to start this series with the other utilities in MakeStuff/blogging. And then go add this list to the README.
- check-html is a simple wrapper for html-tidy, a popular HTML syntax checker. Since it's not actually being used to fix syntax, it can play fast-and-loose with things like the header (it's just text) and blog-specific tags like and . It handles those by putting a space after the "<" character. It would be trivial to add this to the make recipe for post.
- last-post is a site-scraper that returns the URL of your most recent post. It's useful, because charm doesn't return it. (I eventually put that functionality into charm-wrapper, but it's still useful. Eventually it wants to take a date on the command line.
- word-count is what I use to generate the NaBloPoMo statistics at the bottom of posts in November. (In other months, you just get a straight list; you can also get a listing for a whole year.)
NaBloPoMo stats: 43 2019/11/01--rabbit-rabbit-rabbit.html 1731 2019/11/02--s4s-memorials.html 1465 2019/11/03--done-since-1027.html 145 2019/11/04--i-ought-to-post-something.html 430 2019/11/05--how-to-makestuff.html ------- 3814 words in 5 posts this month (average 762/post) 430 words in 1 post today
Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.
[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has
comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]