💾 Archived View for senders.io › gemlog › writing-my-own-software.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:24:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I was reading a new post by a new user Sugar trying to negotiate Jekyll and settling on Agate for the Gemini side at least!
This makes me laugh a little at myself for how hard I make own life. If it's writable by myself, why wouldn't I?
There are many great FOSS solutions to my problems but if I think a few bash scripts and at worst a lil bit of python or something can solve it then why not.
Why am I like this? I know in some part because it's fun. Making little tools is my wheelhouse, my bread and butter. Part of me just knows the command line can do everything I need for this task so why would I introduce some complex thing when my shell script can call a series of complex things to do it!
Now 90% of my scripts are basically just sed anyway.
Mew even said herself in her post on multi-protocol hosting:
I also didn't even know how to start writing a converter. Ultimately I settled on a converter utility that is very much based on the specific HTML layout of my website.
gemini://text.mew151.net/gemlog/2023-06-25_Gemini-Automation.gmi
And that's part of it too: I am sure something like this exists but "could I do it?" Could I make it work specifically for my needs?
As a brief reply to your post Mew:
I just used python using BeautifulSoup to skim my page for headings and p tags and stripped the rest. My sites are basically just articles with zero anything else. So it's usually just appending those together. It's bad, doesn't support lists yet, makes ugly links, and ultimately backwards. For this capsule and my website they're purposefully separate. As you put it I wanted to keep my capsule specific to my capsule. I have another than I mirror the HTTP because it's more a resource than anything - so parity is important.
But with my personal site too: going simple to complex is the better route. I'm likely going to switch over to writing in gemtext for that capsule and creating the HTTP. I think any page that needs advanced markup is actually not being converted anyway like my index and a few others. My personal site uses markdown which I render to html.
I of course for gemtext to html would write my own. Because I have to. It's a disease. But I've never written a parser post uni. And I don't remember how. Are lisps still around? Do they exist? Who am I kidding. It'll be a shell script with sed and cut or something.
Anyway.
These posts made me think about how I approach problems and how 90% of my life is sed.
I joked a bit on fedi about this too and complained about setting up various scripts to do my bidding. And it seems for my other capsule the best way to do CD is to just setup a cron that looks at remote for changes and syncs it if it's on the same branch (this way I can co a commit if I need to pin it or even just disable the cron which I do sometimes)
I don't know. I was up at 5am and reading gemini as one does and started thinking about how I will always try and just write my own anything if it seems possible. It's why I love linux and why I love gemini. Everything is actually manageable in a way where its not too far fetched actually writing things.
If I actually get myself to do any gmi2html work I'll share :)