Combining worlds: blogging and glogging

   _[UPDATED]_

Git, Markdown, and Combining them for Writing

   For years, I have been upset by a missing link between _blogging_ (i.e
   regular publishing on a _web_ page) and _glogging_ (or Phlogging, i.e
   in a _Gopher_ directory).

   A lot of solutions exist for fans of the command line, and some years
   ago, I wrote glog.sh, a shell script to handle glogging. But neither
   this nor any other tool I could find allows to publish in parallel also
   as a blog.

   In adition, I have now been using both git and Markdown heavily in my
   workflow, and therefore I started thinking about their combination with
   blogging and glogging.

   Recently, I wrote a script for automatic generation of an e-mail
   newsletter from git controlled and Markdown formatted text files. As
   this contains all major components of a blog/glog suite, I tried to
   build a complete system, and now it is working, with help from cron
   jobs.

Workflow

   Texts are initially written in Markdown format in a repository
   controlled by Git and cloned on various computers and mobile devices.
   While in draft status, they contain the word DRAFT at the beginning of
   the first line, which gets them ignored by all scripts involved.

   When they are ready for publication and pushed to the remote
   repository, a cronjob on the mail/gopher/web-server will search for
   them, and after HTML and plaintext conversion, the results are mailed
   and stored for publication. A second cronjob generates index files for
   the Web and Gopher versions.

   Pushing to the remote directory could allow for direct triggering of
   backend processing via Git hooks, but the cronjob solution allows for
   independent repositories and processing on various servers, and seemed
   easier and more flexible to me.

   I will try to publish all involved scripts together with some
   documentation, in the coming days. Feedback of course is welcome!
     __________________________________________________________________

   _UPDATE:_

   The various scripts are [1]published on gitlab together with
   documentation. It is currently work in progress, though.

   The blog (HTML) part now includes generation of an RSS feed.
     __________________________________________________________________

   _(2015-1-3,4)_

References

   1. https://gitlab.com/yargo/plog