Autocento of the breakfast table | Autocento of the breakfast table

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Hi. My name is Case Duckworth. This is my thesis.

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Autocento of the breakfast table is an inter/hypertextual exploration of the workings of inspiration, revision, and obsession. I’ve compiled this work over multiple years, and recently linked it all together to form a (hopefully) more cohesive whole. 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.

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Process steps

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Write poems.
Convert to Markdown. -
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Compile to HTML with Pandoc. -
- At first, I used this code in the shell to generate my HTML:
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```
for file in *.txt; do
-            pandoc "$file" -f markdown -t html5 \
-            --template=template.html -o "${file%txt}html"
-            done
```
  - but this proved tedious with time.
- After a lot of experimenting with different scripting languages, I finally realized that GNU make would fit this task perfectly.
- You can see my makefile here—it’s kind of a mess, but it does the job. See below for a more detailed explanation of the makefile.
Style the pages with CSS. -
- I use a pretty basic style for Autocento. You can see my stylesheet here.
Use Github to put them online. -
- Github uses git under the hood—a Version Control System developed for keeping track of large code projects.
- My workflow with git looks like this: -
  - Change files in the project directory—revise a poem, change the makefile, add a style, etc.
  - (If necessary, re-compile with make.)
  - git status tells me which files have changed, which have been added, and if any have been deleted.
  - git add -A adds all the changes to the staging area, or I can add individual files, depending on what I want to commit.
  - 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.
  - git push pushes the changes to the remote repository—in this case, the Github repo that serves http://autocento.me.
  - Lather, rinse, repeat.
Write Makefile to extend build capabilities. -
- 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.
- I’d like to build a compiler for the Index of first lines and Index of common titles once I have time.

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The beauty of this system

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I can compile these poems into (almost) any format: pandoc supports a lot.
Once I complete the above process once, I can focus on revising my poems.
These poems are online for anyone to see and use for their own work.

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