# On bringing back the blog
### entered in vim on RPoJ
### 20181219

[A while back](gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20180909.md) I 
posted when I deleted my website. For months, it said only
"use gopher." I put some thought into where I went wrong 
with the website. My answer to myself was that it was too
full of bullshit fluff. I css'ed the crap out of it.

## The return

I have decided to bring it back, but keep it very gopherish.
Toward that end, it is a simple directory listing, auto-
generated by my httpd. Since the files are written in 
markdown, I wanted to be able to convert these to html, 
without converting to html (which is another reason I hated
the old site -- > 100 static pages to rebuild everytime I 
post). The answer was 
[mod_markdown](https://github.com/hamano/apache-mod-markdown)
which allows exactly what I was looking for.

Along with that, I used 
[mod_ext_filter](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_ext_filter.html)
to utilize sed on the streaming output from the httpd. This
allows on-the-fly changing of gopher to http URLS on the 
blog, and the utilization of the floodgap proxy on non-local
links in gopherspace.

I added a one liner in my blogproc script to generate 
.htaccess descriptions for each phost, using head -1 on 
each file. The result it native looking html blog entries, 
that live on the server as plaintext files formatted in 
markdown. I utilize a symlink, so RPoD only has one copy 
of the Phlog/Blog files. The entire thing is a 
[git repo](https://gitlab.com/leveck/phlog) as well. In 
addition to all this, I have reintroduced http links in 
the atom feed and in the gopher version as well.