From: wayne+blog@waynewerner.com To: everyone.everywhere.all.at.once Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2025 11:23:05 -0500 Subject: Static, But Not Artisinal
One of the very first pages that I wrote here on waynewerner.com was about artisanal HTML. I don't disagree with my initial complaints but I have had some kind of enriching of that original approach.
Similar to the difference between hand carving and powercarving; both of these approaches produce artisinal products, there's differences and similarities between hand-writing all of my HTML and RSS, and using some tools for automating some of that. It's not that I don't enjoy writing HTML, but I've realised that most of the time I just really want to post some information. Basically micro-blogging, like I might over at Fosstodon
But less reliant on a 3rd party. After all, if I keep my site built in git, then anyone who can clone my repo can also view my writings.
Anyway, I am writing this to document a bit about my ideas for making blogging wonderful to me.
The first mild improvement is that I am going to automate the building of the HTML & friends. At least, when it comes to blogging. I've resisted that on principle, but I think that re-starting from scratch has given me a bit of an appreciation for the addition of automation into the process. After all, I'm already typing things digitally vs. hand copying messages like I'm in some kind of Scriptorium.
But I also think that I have the right of it with the approach that I'll be
taking. I will be updating my HTML straight out of Compton my blog
mails. I definitely have a good idea when it comes to handling comments:
the mbox format. I can store them as replies within the mbox message
itself. The question at this point is whether I want to just have one post per
mbox, or have more messages in each mbox folder.
Currently I don't have the idea of tags, but I'm pretty sure I'll just do that
as X-tags: message header. I think that I should consider the date as the
Message-ID. Or possibly add some automation/tooling to convert an email
date into a mid. But for now it's super silly simple. I just read the files
I've got and simply render it into HTML.
ETX