💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~oldernow › 2023-10-30-05-44-48.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:51:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Post mania

Duck alignment

As is my tendency, I spent a bunch of time yesterday agonizing over post format, which included matters like:

Should there be a date in the title? (Seemingly unnecessary in Bubble, but possibly nice if/when mirroring post elsewhere.)
Should there be a date in the post itself, e.g. on a level two header after a level one header title? Should it be 12-hour with AM/PM format, or 24-hour format?
Do I really want to use a level one header (#) for the title given how gargantuan it seems to be rendered relative to body text unless I also use level two and level three headers so there doesn't seem to be so big a text size difference? But, then, I rarely write posts in which three levels of nested headers improve readability. (Or am I wrong about that?)
Should links to posts in my own capsule be absolute or relative?
How should I format file names to facilitate automation?

And so on.

And of course none of that is absolutely necessary, but simply tends to grate on me over time if/when discovering I wish I'd done any of that differently, and of course will want to blow time/effort on making past posts conform to what I wish I'd gotten "right" in the first place.

Perhaps that attitude is good for software development. But it can rather suck for mental/emotional health.

I like me an audience infinitely more after publishing than while writing

I just deleted several paragraphs of motivation details, but suffice it to say there are times when I'd rather the rest of the world not know when I'm writing a post.

That occasional need led to writing the following Lua script, which loops on clearing the screen after taking a line of text on standard input, depositing each gulped line in a file specified as a first argument. (A second argument tells it to complete those lines with two newlines instead of the default of one, because sometimes I want those saved lines to be separated by blank lines.)

It's hardly perfect, but pretty gosh danged useful when it seems being seen to be writing a post might trigger misunderstanding.

#! /usr/bin/env lua
local eol = '\n'
if arg[2] then
  eol = '\n\n'
end
local out = nil
if arg[1] then
  out = io.open(arg[1], 'a')
  if not out then
    print('=== could not open file for write: "' .. arg[1] .. '"')
    os.exit()
  end
else
  print('=== missing filename argument')
  os.exit()
end
while true do
  os.execute('clear')
  local line = io.stdin:read()
  if line then
    out:write(line .. eol)
  else
    break
  end
end