<< spelk.online

BLOP

by spelk on September 28, 2021

The Everchange

This site has been worked and re-worked a number of times over the years. At one point it had a different name and was a full blown Wordpress installation with all the guff and gubbins that entails.

When I made the move to Neocities.org hosting, I was determined to simplify this site and my digital life. A little bit of custom CSS styling and a handcrafted site built with Emacs and Orgmode and an Emacs add-on that allowed me to export my .org files to .html

Then I got wind of the Gopher protocol from yesteryear and wanted to embrace the simplicity of that. So I rolled a Gopherhole hosted on sdf.org.

Naturally, my interest in Gopher led to a newer more modern interpretation of a minimalist, usuable web in the form of the Gemini protocol. Gemini takes all the good from Gopher and packages it up into something more modern and easier to manage.

With inspiration and tuition from the Trendy Talk crew (HexDSL, Drew/Uoou and Chris Were) I rolled up a Digital Ocean droplet, installed the Agate Gemini Server on it and started hosting a Gemlog.

Since I had a spare Raspberry Pi lying around I thought there has to be a way to self-host this Gemlog, cutting out the Digital Ocean monthly costs and using a Dynamic DNS service to make the site live from my Pi.

The DietPi OS came to the rescue and I managed to get the Agate server installed and the No-IP dynamic DNS service to point my domain name to the self hosted Pi.

Now I had an active self-hosted Gemlog AND a Neocities hosted web site. I wanted to make them the same. So I spent time getting to the point where I created .gmi content and used a script to convert that to HTML to upload to the normal, but minimal web version.

Then, after an update, my Pi died.

So trying to work out how to fix the setup, get my Gemlog back up, so I can update content in my Gemini site and convert it to my web site, I found Drew/Uoou’s BLOP script.

BLOP

A straightforward, minimal and easy way to create a static web site using a BASH script to convert markdown content to html.

As much as I admire the Gemini protocol, I’m not sure I’m dedicated enough to keep a Gemini server rolling and also trying to mirror it to my web host, given the little amount of content I push up. It’s important for me to have a presence, for reasons.. but I’m always distracted elsewhere.. so I thought I’d go for the simplest least resistant way to get content up, now and then. And BLOP seemed ideal for that job.

The Gemini microblogging I used to do, under the guise of my Shadowrun inspired “Drek” page (aka Effluent of the Mind) - incidentally - using more scripting help from Drew - now needed to massaged into the BLOP way of things.

Since Drews scripts are minimal but useful and instructive, I was able to smash my Gemini command line commenting/microblogging into something that updates a markdown page in the BLOP scheme. So I can continue to whisper endless mind meanderings into the void using BLOP. Sorted.

The big challenge now is to come up with any content that I can justify worthy of putting up the my site.

In these times, with what is happening socially and politically, I find very little enthusiasm for anything other than constant distraction.

Anyways, all kudos and thanks goes to Drew/Uoou and his scripting prowess and the Trendy Talk guys and the Mastodon folks on Linuxrocks.online or all the other people I follow there that keep my tech and ethical interests alive.