--- title: Autocento of the breakfast table subtitle: process narrative genre: prose id: process toc: "Process narrative" project: title: Front matter class: front-matter ... ## 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. - 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][makefile]---it's kind of a mess, but it does the job. See below for a more detailed explanation of the makefile. 4. Style the pages with CSS. - I use a pretty basic style for _Autocento_. You can see my stylesheet [here][stylesheet]. 4. 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 . - Lather, rinse, repeat. 5. 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. ## 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 use for their own work. [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 [makefile]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/makefile [stylesheet]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/style.css [Github]: https://github.com [Hapax legomenon]: hapax.html [back-link]: makefile [random link functionality]: trunk/lozenge.js [Index of first lines]: first-lines.html [Index of common titles]: common-titles.html