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diff --git a/www/blog/2022-11-06/index.html b/www/blog/2022-11-06/index.html deleted file mode 100644 index 184f422..0000000 --- a/www/blog/2022-11-06/index.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,248 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html> -<html lang="en"> -<head> - <meta charset="utf-8"> - <meta name="generator" - content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for Linux version 5.7.45"> - <title>senders.io - My Markdown -> 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="/blog">blog</a> <a rel="external noopener noreferrer" - target="_blank" - href="https://github.com/s3nd3r5">github</a> <a rel= - "external noopener noreferrer" - target="_blank" - href="https://git.senders.io">cgit</a> <a rel= - "me external noopener noreferrer" - target="_blank" - href="https://tech.lgbt/@senders">fedi</a> - </nav> - </div> - <div id="body"> - <article> - <h2>My Markdown -> 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><article> -<h2> Title </h2> -<p> - Some paragraph.... -</p> -<h3> -<p> some subsection </p> -</h3> -<p> more text </p> -... 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 quick 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 id='copyright'> - © 2023 senders dot io - <a rel="license external noopener noreferrer" - target="_blank" - href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA - 4.0</a> unless otherwise noted. - </div> - </div> -</body> -</html> |