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| 1 | --- | ||
| 2 | title: Autocento of the breakfast table | ||
| 3 | subtitle: process narrative | ||
| 4 | genre: prose | ||
| 5 | |||
| 6 | id: process | ||
| 7 | toc: "Process narrative" | ||
| 8 | |||
| 9 | project: | ||
| 10 | title: Front matter | ||
| 11 | class: front-matter | ||
| 12 | ... | ||
| 13 | |||
| 14 | ## Hi. My name is Case Duckworth. This is my thesis. | ||
| 15 | |||
| 16 | _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is an inter/hypertextual exploration of the workings of inspiration, revision, and obsession. | ||
| 17 | I've compiled this work over multiple years, and recently linked it all together to form a (hopefully) more cohesive whole. | ||
| 18 | To make this easier than collating everything by hand, I've relied on a process that leverages open-source technologies to publish my work onto a web platform. | ||
| 19 | |||
| 20 | ## Process steps | ||
| 21 | |||
| 22 | 1. Write poems. | ||
| 23 | 2. Convert to Markdown. | ||
| 24 | - Markdown, originally by [John Gruber][], is a lightweight markup language that allows me to focus on the _content_ of my writing, knowing that I can work on the _presentation_ later. | ||
| 25 | - The original `markdown.pl` program is buggy and inconsistent with how it applies styles to markup. It also only works to convert text to HTML. | ||
| 26 | - Because of these limitations, I've used John MacFarlane's [extended Markdown syntax][], which lets me write richer documents and programmatically compile my work into multiple formats. | ||
| 27 | 3. Compile to HTML with Pandoc. | ||
| 28 | - At first, I used this code in the shell to generate my HTML: | ||
| 29 | ```bash | ||
| 30 | for file in *.txt; do | ||
| 31 | pandoc "$file" -f markdown -t html5 \ | ||
| 32 | --template=template.html -o "${file%txt}html" | ||
| 33 | done | ||
| 34 | ``` | ||
| 35 | but this proved tedious with time. | ||
| 36 | - After a lot of experimenting with different scripting languages, I finally realized that [`GNU make`][] would fit this task perfectly. | ||
| 37 | - You can see my makefile [here][makefile]---it's kind of a mess, but it does the job. See below for a more detailed explanation of the makefile. | ||
| 38 | 4. Style the pages with CSS. | ||
| 39 | - I use a pretty basic style for _Autocento_. You can see my stylesheet [here][stylesheet]. | ||
| 40 | 4. Use [Github][] to put them online. | ||
| 41 | - Github uses `git` under the hood---a Version Control System developed for keeping track of large code projects. | ||
| 42 | - My workflow with `git` looks like this: | ||
| 43 | - Change files in the project directory---revise a poem, change the makefile, add a style, etc. | ||
| 44 | - (If necessary, re-compile with `make`.) | ||
| 45 | - `git status` tells me which files have changed, which have been added, and if any have been deleted. | ||
| 46 | - `git add -A` adds all the changes to the _staging area_, or I can add individual files, depending on what I want to commit. | ||
| 47 | - `git commit -m "[message]"` commits the changes to git. This means they're "saved"---if I do something I want to revert, I can `git revert` back to a commit and start again. | ||
| 48 | - `git push` pushes the changes to the _remote repository_---in this case, the Github repo that serves <http://autocento.me>. | ||
| 49 | - Lather, rinse, repeat. | ||
| 50 | 5. Write Makefile to extend build capabilities. | ||
| 51 | - As of now, I've completed a _[Hapax legomenon][]_ compiler, a [back-link][] compiler, and an updater for the [random link functionality][] that's on this site. | ||
| 52 | - I'd like to build a compiler for the [Index of first lines][] and [Index of common titles][] once I have time. | ||
| 53 | |||
| 54 | ## The beauty of this system | ||
| 55 | |||
| 56 | - I can compile these poems into (almost) any format: `pandoc` supports a lot. | ||
| 57 | - Once I complete the above process once, I can focus on revising my poems. | ||
| 58 | - These poems are online for anyone to see and use for their own work. | ||
| 59 | |||
| 60 | [John Gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ | ||
| 61 | [extended Markdown syntax]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdown | ||
| 62 | [`GNU make`]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html | ||
| 63 | [makefile]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/makefile | ||
| 64 | [stylesheet]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/style.css | ||
| 65 | [Github]: https://github.com | ||
| 66 | [Hapax legomenon]: hapax.html | ||
| 67 | [back-link]: makefile | ||
| 68 | [random link functionality]: trunk/lozenge.js | ||
| 69 | [Index of first lines]: first-lines.html | ||
| 70 | [Index of common titles]: common-titles.html | ||