I’m working on being able to publish specific Day One entries
 to the tilde verse as an old-school blog

2023-07-12 - Floral Park


It's available in different formats, served over different
protocols:

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[1] being on the
command line, has no tests, and is generally cobbled/hacked
together.

1: https://tildegit.org/mycrobe/cmsetlbbq/src/branch/main/DEPENDENCIES
 Future plans?


Future work is tracked in the tildegit repo[2] and as of the
time of writing the most interesting ones are

2: https://tildegit.org/mycrobe/cmsetlbbq/issues
 * #12 Make it so that the blog can be iteratively updated[3],
 rather than entirely regenerated in one shot from one day
 one export

 * #6 Add commenting using mastodon[4].

3: https://tildegit.org/mycrobe/cmsetlbbq/issues/12
4: https://tildegit.org/mycrobe/cmsetlbbq/issues/6
 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.




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