https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2024.txt

I am in Home Depot, getting mulch and Halloween decorations.

Road safety is important, Bluey!

Technical details:

• I wrote this using DayOne on my iPhone
• I used Day One's markdown json export option, which archives all the content of posts including media
• I transferred it to my pubnix from my phone
• Various scripts that I have duct-taped together and put in a cronjob then rebuild my static blog/phlog/gemlog
• I updated the article on September 23rd, while sitting in my car while waiting outside my son’s flute lesson. By the strictest definitions of ROOPHLOCH this might be disqualifying, but in my defense, the windows are open

Herein is a quick post to attempt to remedy this by a) proposing some Content, and b) proposing some changes to the code that publishes it. Here follows an unordered list of things I’d like to write about / improve for this journal thing

• Update on Oxford Half Marathon. Not sure I need to do the full chronological thing for the whole oxford trip... But yeah. I did a run, it went well, I was happy, Richard sandbagged, we went on a canal boat etc. Related: What are my plans for this year?
• Pontificating on getting a new bike, aka my quixotic quest for a single solution to a bunch of incompatible requirements.
• ...and the same thing, but about work. Ha.
• Discussion on experiments with comments hosted on mastodon, which is a thing that the code I wrote supports, but then didn’t use. Or I should just admit that this is gemini-first, and submit new posts to antenna.
• Noodle on the idea of having a chronological feed in the journal of finished things, and then an un-RSSed part for public, but not “finished” bits. Maybe writing in public is better for me? Even if no-one reads it anyway!

This is a test of the outdoor warning system. This is only a test.

As blared out in San Franciso at noon every Tuesday.

Here, I'm testing a journal entry that is not coming from Day One. Instead it's a handwritten markdown file. I've modified the code to have sensible defaults if it can't find any metadata from frontmatter. It uses folder creation date for entry date, and has location hardcoded as America/New_York. In this case I manually added frontmatter so that the entry could be tagged.

Html

Gemini

Gopher

Atom feed

Movtivation

I’ve noticed that writing a journal, while very sporadic, is the most consistent writing that I do. Some of the things I journal are suitable for public consumption even if not particularly interesting.

So I’ve created a “public” tag in my journal app, and wrote some code to turn those public entries into blog entries. Source is here: https://tildegit.org/mycrobe/cmsetlbbq

One thing I've noticed during this work is that my expectation of who the audience is has changed my perspective on how public journal articles should be. I suspect this blog will be like a twitch stream with 0 followers, but that's almost beside the point because it's changing my approach to this writing.

(Until I get bored with the whole thing and forget about it, that is.)

What is the workflow

Manual steps

• Search for the "public" tag in Day One app on MacOS (haven’t tried on iOS, maybe it works there too?)
• Select-all entries manually
• Extract in json format
• Upload zip to tilde.club using scp

The processDayone script

• Run a day-one-to-markdown script that converts the json doc to a bunch of folders, one per entry. Each folder contains all the media files and an index\.markdown file that is frontmatter formatted
• Resize and strip EXIF from all images (and in the future will turn movies into animated gifs)
• For each folder, create gemini, gopher, web documents from templates + data
• Create an index page, and a feed.xml
• For each tag in all the entries, create a tag-index page and feed.xml

The script depends on a bunch of executables being on the command line, has no tests, and is generally cobbled/hacked together.

Future plans?

Future work is tracked in the tildegit repo and as of the time of writing the most interesting ones are

• #12 Make it so that the blog can be iteratively updated, rather than entirely regenerated in one shot from one day one export
• #6 Add commenting using mastodon.

Commenting thoughts

I was talking to N. Morrell about the latter, and he said

I’ve seen people using mastodon for comments, even on static sites, which feels technically fun

And followed up with

Here’s some links describing it, mostly for Jekyll but also Hugo. I think it requires posting new blogposts to Mastodon (in order to have a Mastodon post id to work from), which I assume you’re not yet doing.

https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/mastodon-comments

https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/

https://yidhra.farm/tech/jekyll/2022/01/03/mastodon-comments-for-jekyll.html

https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/

https://danielpecos.com/2022/12/25/mastodon-as-comment-system-for-your-static-blog/

This is great because a) it validates my idea as being practical and b) gives me example code to work with. (Maybe I could have googled them myself...)

I will probably refactor it to work in node via cgi, tho, so it can be formatted for gemini and gopher too. And old browsers with no JS.

Here’s a naked link to an earlier article The sky got worse today from the wildfires

Here’s a link to an article that is not shared BROKEN LINK

Here’s a link that’s got a text description. It’s the same as the first link.

These links may well be broken for a while on the blog/phlog/gemlog, and work to support it is tracked in https://tildegit.org/mycrobe/cmsetlbbq/issues/27