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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:

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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