💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › oldernow › 11313 captured on 2023-11-14 at 08:35:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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As is my tendency, I spent a bunch of time yesterday agonizing over post format, which included matters like:
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 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
Oct 30 · 2 weeks ago
☯️ oldernow · Oct 30 at 12:53:
Ack....
Timestamps within posts started looking stupid to me, and I didn't like the way I was naming post files.
Life seems just one big refactor at times....
analysis paralysis is why I've never been that good at programming. I always wanted to do it right the first time or fix it to perfection before moving on...and busted my timelines. 8 hrs for that feature? nah, how about 16 or 20?
Whatever you do, keep it simple, that's a (1) key to your capsule longevity. So, I'd say, unless the date matters, that's something you might skip within the post themselves. Myself, I name my posts as YYYY-MM-DD_whatever_is.gmi
☯️ oldernow · Oct 31 at 02:39:
"Analysis paralysis": a new term to me. Definitely nails it.
I did wind up simplifying significantly. Files are now named yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss.gmi. An index.gmi associates a yyyy-mm-dd and title with each file so others don't have to get bogged down in hour/minute/second, but can maybe derive meta perspective from temporal distance between posts.
And thus is the paralysis seemingly over. How nice to have feeling in mind's extremities again!
Then there are those who feel the need to go and cure everyone else’s analysis paralysis by convincing the world to name their gmi files in exactly the same way…