Combining worlds: blogging and glogging

[UPDATED]

Git, Markdown, and Combining them for Writing

For years, I have been upset by a missing link between blogging (i.e regular publishing on a web page) and glogging (or Phlogging, i.e in a Gopher directory).

A lot of solutions exist for fans of the command line, and some years ago, I wrote glog.sh, a shell script to handle glogging. But neither this nor any other tool I could find allows to publish in parallel also as a blog.

In adition, I have now been using both git and Markdown heavily in my workflow, and therefore I started thinking about their combination with blogging and glogging.

Recently, I wrote a script for automatic generation of an e-mail newsletter from git controlled and Markdown formatted text files. As this contains all major components of a blog/glog suite, I tried to build a complete system, and now it is working, with help from cron jobs.

Workflow

Texts are initially written in Markdown format in a repository controlled by Git and cloned on various computers and mobile devices. While in draft status, they contain the word DRAFT at the beginning of the first line, which gets them ignored by all scripts involved.

When they are ready for publication and pushed to the remote repository, a cronjob on the mail/gopher/web-server will search for them, and after HTML and plaintext conversion, the results are mailed and stored for publication. A second cronjob generates index files for the Web and Gopher versions.

Pushing to the remote directory could allow for direct triggering of backend processing via Git hooks, but the cronjob solution allows for independent repositories and processing on various servers, and seemed easier and more flexible to me.

I will try to publish all involved scripts together with some documentation, in the coming days. Feedback of course is welcome!


UPDATE:

The various scripts are published on gitlab together with documentation. It is currently work in progress, though.

The blog (HTML) part now includes generation of an RSS feed.


(2015-1-3,4)