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authorBill <bill@billserver.senders.io>2022-11-05 23:41:46 -0400
committerBill <bill@billserver.senders.io>2022-11-05 23:41:46 -0400
commit768f44a55bf757abe1bfc0829de301ade964354e (patch)
treea45e3a82fb65f926c37eda89b407ae7b4f46e4a5 /www/blog/2022-11-06/index.html
parent3c055d4d579a0b78a9a9ebc622cec32037e958ac (diff)
Create new MD blog post and retidy
I updated tidy so each file got a nice update along with the actual update
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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+ <meta charset="utf-8">
+ <meta name="generator"
+ content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for Linux version 5.6.0">
+ <title>senders.io - My Markdown -&gt; HTML Setup</title>
+ <link rel='stylesheet'
+ type='text/css'
+ href='/index.css'>
+ <meta name="viewport"
+ content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
+</head>
+<body>
+ <div id='header'>
+ <a class='title'
+ href='/'>senders.io</a>
+ <nav>
+ <a href="/resume">Resume</a> <a href="/blog">Blog</a> <a rel=
+ "noopener noreferrer external"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://github.com/s3nd3r5">Github</a>
+ </nav>
+ </div>
+ <div id="body">
+ <article>
+ <h2>My Markdown -&gt; HTML Setup</h2>
+ <p>A common way I see a lot of people blog, especially micro-blog, is in
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">markdown</a>.</p>
+ <figure>
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted
+ text using a plain-text editor.</p>
+ </blockquote>
+ <figcaption>
+ <cite>— <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown">Wikipedia |
+ Markdown</a></cite>
+ </figcaption>
+ </figure>
+ <p>It built itself on-top of common syntax prevalent on the web and was
+ designed to be converted into simple HTML output. Since it leveraged
+ preexisting syntax it was easy for new users to pick up, and is now found
+ all over the web and applications.</p>
+ <p>Since I started this website, I had been writing each page by hand
+ using a few tools to facilitate that - and for a while I had been looking
+ for a good way to try out using markdown to generate some lighter pages
+ and these blogposts.</p>
+ <h3>Writing HTML by hand</h3>
+ <p>When it comes to blogging a lot of platforms offer WYSIWYG editor –
+ allowing users to write in rich-text that then gets converted into HTML
+ in the style of the platform. But for my case, since I self host this
+ website, I decided to stick to my roots and write PURE HTML instead.</p>
+ <p>HTML is fairly simple and easy once you get use to the basic structure
+ of the system. And since I’ve been working in HTML almost two decades
+ now, at the time it felt like the best solution to make a clean
+ website.</p>
+ <p>I briefly touched on my design process in <a href=
+ "/blog/2019-01-21/">2019-01-21 - First! A New Years Resolution</a>
+ outlining that I wanted to make a very lightweight and simple website.
+ And at the time I believed the best way to achieve this goal was to
+ carefully structure and craft my website’s HTML by hand.</p>
+ <p>This article is making the process sound far more difficult than it is
+ – it’s mostly just tedious.</p>
+ <pre><code>&lt;article&gt;
+&lt;h2&gt; Title &lt;/h2&gt;
+&lt;p&gt;
+ Some paragraph....
+&lt;/p&gt;
+&lt;h3&gt;
+&lt;p&gt; some subsection &lt;/p&gt;
+&lt;/h3&gt;
+&lt;p&gt; more text &lt;/p&gt;
+... etc
+</code></pre>
+ <p>Is essentially what the website looks like - you can view the source
+ of this page to see – it’s very simple HTML.</p>
+ <p>The benefit I found doing this, mostly leveraging <a href=
+ "www.html-tidy.org/">tidy</a>, allowed a very easy to edit codebase. And
+ by leveraging the existing tags and their properties I also attempted to
+ keep the styling to an absolute minimum. Using existing tags to enforce
+ the styling I desired.</p>
+ <p>Only for certain areas (tables, code, quotes) where readability is an
+ issue do I setup custom CSS.</p>
+ <p>Most of this process is actually what will continue to happen but the
+ actual writing process will be unobstructed by the tedium of writing
+ HTML.</p>
+ <h3>Micro-blogging in general</h3>
+ <p>At the time of writing this, I have no ported over any of my <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://gemini.circumlunar.space/">Gemini</a> micro-blogs. This
+ warrants a longer post, since I wrote consistently in gemini from
+ March 2021 through May 2021 – having only stopped due to a long move
+ leading to a lot of server downtime breaking the habit. My gemini
+ updated multiple days a week - mostly due to the extremely lightweight
+ and limited nature of the platform.</p>
+ <h4>Gemtext</h4>
+ <p><a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi">Gemtext</a>
+ was the gemini protocol’s standard MIME type. It was a basic markup
+ language that relied on line based syntax. It was purposefully as lean
+ as necessary because this was what was ACTUALLY being served to
+ clients – unlike Markdown which first needed to be converted to HTML,
+ gemtext was the actual text served and rendered on the viewers client.
+ You could customize the style of your client - but you could not, as
+ an author, dictate how your content would be viewed. This meant the
+ only aspects of your blog you had control over was the actual content
+ and it’s structure – which for a blog is really all you should care
+ about.</p>
+ <p>It’s syntax contained most of what I was actually using here already
+ from HTML:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>headings</li>
+ <li>paragraphs that were wrapped based on page-width</li>
+ <li>links</li>
+ <li>lists</li>
+ <li>quotes</li>
+ <li>preformatted-text / codeblocks</li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Besides links - it also leveraged the same common syntaxes that
+ markdown did.</p>
+ <h4>Gemtext links</h4>
+ <p>From my brief time in the IRC and in geminispace in general - a lot of
+ the “recommendations” came from new users about providing in-line links.
+ The philosophy was that by forcing links to exist on their own line -
+ clients could configure how they wanted these to be seen and not have to
+ worry about links interfering with the text.</p>
+ <figure>
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>Like Gopher (and unlike Markdown or HTML), Gemtext only lets you
+ put links to other documents on a line of their own. You can’t make a
+ single word in the middle of a sentence into a link. This takes a
+ little getting used to, but it means that links are extremely easy to
+ find, and clients can style them differently (e.g. to make it clear
+ which protocol they use, or to display the domain name to help users
+ decide whether they want to follow them or not) without interfering
+ with the readability of your actual textual content.</p>
+ </blockquote>
+ <figcaption>
+ — <cite><a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi">gemini.circumlunar.space
+ – A quite introduction to “gemtext” markup | Links</a></cite>
+ </figcaption>
+ </figure>
+ <p>I felt that this provided a lot of useful limitations that removed a
+ huge barrier for me to actually write down ideas without feeling over
+ burdened. I also lurked in the IRC - as well as <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://github.com/s3nd3r5/java-gemini-server">implemented my
+ own gemini server</a>.</p>
+ <p>As a quick aside – the java server was a lot of fun! The protocol was
+ very simple to work with for basic gemtext. I felt the ultimate downside
+ was trying to build something for basic gemini capsule hosting (like I
+ was using for a decent chunk of my time with gemini) - and something for
+ developers to use as a base application server. At the time in 2021 a lot
+ of talk was happening on IRC of users starting to look to provide more
+ complex experiences via the protocol and I wanted a way for those
+ interactions to be built out in Java - since most were in Go or Python at
+ the time. This decision lead to me burning out due to difficulties
+ splitting those responsiblities easily - where you could host along side
+ your application - since I lacked the experience with more complex Gemini
+ capsule applications.</p>
+ <p>But it was a good experience and I got hands on experience with Certs,
+ Netty, and SNI - which actually came in handy at my job!</p>
+ <h3>Wasn’t this about Markdown?</h3>
+ <p>A lot of what I liked about Gemini I found missing when I returned to
+ the World Wide Web. Writing a new post was tedious and I actually had a
+ few drafts sitting unposted. They’re probably checked into my git at this
+ moment! So I thought - why not just use markdown and convert to HTML?
+ That’s what it’s built for - and I already designed my site to work with
+ minimal customization of raw HTML tags!</p>
+ <h3>How I use Markdown</h3>
+ <p>Firstly, this blogpost was written in Markdown (with minimal HTML
+ sprinkled in). Then I render the markdown into HTML using <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/">Discount</a>.
+ Frankly, I don’t know how I stumbled across this markdown parser - I
+ think it came pre-installed on my KDE Arch system because another KDE
+ program used it. But I liked it, and it seemed extensible enough for
+ my needs.</p>
+ <p>This would produce the “body” of my articles - and I could then
+ prepend and append the template-head and foot to my html output to form a
+ blog post/web page.</p>
+ <h4>Customizations</h4>
+ <p>After I generated the output file, I replaced some placeholders in the
+ templates via <code>sed</code> and then <code>tidy</code>’d the HTML. The
+ only other major issue was Discount had no way of appending any link
+ attributes – so for external links I had <code>sed</code> append the
+ <code>rel</code> and <code>target</code> attributes - which work off the
+ assumption they’re not there. A lot of my home-server scripts rely on
+ assumptions…</p>
+ <p>This is all bundled up in a simple script file so I can just supply a
+ few arguments and the full page is re-rendered on command.</p>
+ <h3>Two Sources of Truth</h3>
+ <p>In the sytem I devised the markdown files are really the “source of
+ truth” but you could argue that the HTML files hold equal weigh - as
+ they’re what you’re reading right now. The markdown is only useful if I
+ render it as HTML. There exist nginx extensions to serve markdown as HTML
+ so I store everything as markdown. I could also provide some heading
+ information to the markdowns to remove the command arguments and have on
+ boot it generate the .html files in place before launching the site… But
+ these are all nice ideas for a later date.</p>
+ <p>Ultimately, this is something I contribute to ocassionally - I don’t
+ need something too complicated. I just need to output some HTML a few
+ times a year. So if I manually publish the HTML each time - that’s likely
+ far more efficent then re-rendering.</p>
+ <h3>Learnings</h3>
+ <p>This is the first post that uses this - though I’ve converted a page
+ over to this already. But once I worked out the kinks and built a flow
+ that works for me - this made the writing process a LOT easier. Another
+ issue was that once I <code>tidy</code>’d the HTML file - it became
+ frustrating to edit, and I didn’t always re-tidy it. Because the output
+ is always <code>tidy</code>’d by the script - I can edit the raw markdown
+ as needed. And the script generally will always output the same file
+ (with whatever changes I made of course). This makes the editing and git
+ history a lot clearer.</p>
+ <p>I would recommend writing in markdown - or even trying out gemini -
+ you can host your gemini capsule on the web even! (Most gemini webpages
+ are gemini capsules converted). I am sure other “blog focused markups”
+ also exist too.</p>
+ </article>
+ <div id="footer">
+ <i>November 06, 2022</i>
+ </div>
+ </div>
+</body>
+</html>