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1 | --- | ||
2 | title: Autocento of the breakfast table | ||
3 | subtitle: process narrative | ||
4 | id: process | ||
5 | genre: prose | ||
6 | |||
7 | project: | ||
8 | title: About Autocento | ||
9 | class: meta | ||
10 | ... | ||
11 | |||
12 | Hi. My name is Case Duckworth. This is my thesis. | ||
13 | --------------------------------------------------- | ||
14 | |||
15 | _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is an inter/hypertextual exploration of the workings of inspiration, revision, and obsession. | ||
16 | I've compiled this work over multiple years, and recently linked it all together to form a (hopefully) more cohesive whole. | ||
17 | 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. | ||
18 | |||
19 | Process steps | ||
20 | ------------- | ||
21 | |||
22 | 1. Write poems. | ||
23 | 2. Convert to Markdown -- generally easy. | ||
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 "$file" -f markdown -t html5 --template=template.html -o "${file%txt}html" | ||
32 | done | ||
33 | ``` | ||
34 | but this proved tedious with time. | ||
35 | - After a lot of experimenting with different scripting languages, I finally realized that [`GNU make`][] would fit this task perfectly. | ||
36 | - You can see my makefile [here][] | ||
37 | |||
38 | 4. Style the pages with CSS. | ||
39 | 4. Use Github to put them online. | ||
40 | - `git` has been used throughout to keep track of changes. | ||
41 | - It's a Version Control System -- usually used for code but adapted | ||
42 | for creative writing. | ||
43 | 5. Write Makefile for ease-of-compilation. | ||
44 | - A `makefile` is a collection of instructions to `make` that tells it how | ||
45 | to compile a set of files. | ||
46 | - It's made the other parts of this much easier. | ||
47 | 6. Write _Hapax legomenon_ compiler. | ||
48 | 7. Write compiler for backlinks. | ||
49 | 8. (TODO) write compiler for Index of first lines and common titles. | ||
50 | |||
51 | The beauty of this system | ||
52 | ------------------------- | ||
53 | |||
54 | - I can compile these poems into (almost) any format: `pandoc` supports a lot. | ||
55 | - Once I complete the above process once, I can focus on revising my poems. | ||
56 | - These poems are online for anyone to see and work off of. | ||
57 | - Something something intertextuality. | ||
58 | |||
59 | [John Gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ | ||
60 | [extended Markdown syntax]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdown | ||
61 | [`GNU make`]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html | ||
62 | [here]: | ||