Writing for the Internet Across a Human Lifetime

WRITING FOR THE INTERNET ACROSS A HUMAN LIFETIME No more walled gardens, no more chains of complexity. Today I declare what once was, is again. Never again will I run another invocation of a static site generator or document renderer. 80 to 100 characters per line is and will continue to be maximum width of English documents. No longer do I pull from social networks, but they will pull from me. This is MY writing platform. Mine. Me. There is no way to censor or revoke my power. The Internet does not forget one byte, or one bit. http://len.falken.ink is an RSS feed of my writing which never has to be visited twice. With an RSS reader, readers only need my URL to begin receiving my posts, and at any time, can revoke their subscription on their terms. Once a piece goes out, it can never be retrieved back. It can be presented in any fashion. Discussions can happen on any platform and be linked using the tag. No one needs special software to establish a push-based publishing system as I have here. RSS is well supported, and so is plain text. Using monospace fonts, it is possible to create multi-column layouts and other typesetting features without involving complex software stacks. Many papers in the 1900s were typeset this way, and there's no reason why this is not good enough for most people. For those who need the extra precision: use it. This is not an argument against tools like Microsoft Word or LaTeX; this is a wake up call, that most of us don't need them. But then I hear: what about links? Images? I respond: URLs. Plain text supports URLs no problem. https://ift.tt/1O9q9UE Look at that, you can see that image if you want by clicking. (Hi Google) Does your platform support uploading SVGs, 3D print files, and programs? This one does: you just link to it in your feed. Now maybe you wonder what this system is composed of. No problem I say, check this list: ASCII, sh, awk, grep, find, cd, mkdir, head, tail and editor. Here's the RSS generator (35 lines of sh): /home/len/Wiki/rss.sh:1.1,35.9 #!/bin/sh DOMAIN="http://len.falken.ink" PUBLIC_DIR="./public/" AUTHOR="len@falken.ink" posts=$( find public -type f | \ grep -v .git | \ xargs ls -Stl --time-style=long-iso | \ awk '{ print $6 "T" $7 ":00 " $8 }' | \ sed 's/public\///' \ ) echo " $DOMAIN Len's collection of writing on all topics of interest. Copyright 2020, Len Falken 60"; echo "$posts" | while read -r time file; do echo " $DOMAIN/$file $(head -n 2 $PUBLIC_DIR$file | tail -n 1) $AUTHOR $DOMAIN/$file#$time "; done echo " "; Run rss.sh > index.xml, and upload your writing directory (folder), index.xml and index.css to your web server. It's up to the reader what text editor, file transfer tool and web hosting solution they use. They can even decide on not using HTTP. All documents are already rendered, there is no software required to read these in 100, 200, 300 years. It is warming to know what I write will be accessible to the next generations of the Internet , not just 2 years from now. I hope this inspires others to adopt similar methods, in order to invoke interesting conversation and end running in circles, and to be remembered for their contributions. Enjoy and read you later, -- Len

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2TMznRx