---
title: Autocento of the breakfast table
subtitle: process narrative
id: process
genre: prose

project:
    title: About Autocento
    class: meta
...

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

_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.

Process steps
-------------

1. Write poems.
2. Convert to Markdown -- generally easy.
    - 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.
3. Compile to HTML with Pandoc.
    - At first, I used this code in the shell to generate my HTML:
        ```bash
        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][]

4. Style the pages with CSS.
4. Use Github to put them online.
    - `git` has been used throughout to keep track of changes.
    - It's a Version Control System -- usually used for code but adapted
      for creative writing.
5. Write Makefile for ease-of-compilation.
    - A `makefile` is a collection of instructions to `make` that tells it how
      to compile a set of files.
    - It's made the other parts of this much easier.
6. Write _Hapax legomenon_ compiler.
7. Write compiler for backlinks.
8. (TODO) write compiler for Index of first lines and common titles.

The beauty of this system
-------------------------

- 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 work off of.
- Something something intertextuality.

[John Gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[extended Markdown syntax]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdown
[`GNU make`]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
[here]: