# text-only: Announcing text.alexkarle.com
_Published: September 20, 2021_
This past week I rolled out [
https://text.alexkarle.com], and I
wanted to write a little bit about it!
## What
text.alexkarle.com is a text-only ascii dump of this entire site.
It's served over HTTP, HTTPS, and Gopher to provide a wide array of
options for accessing the content.
## Why
I'm a huge fan of the "small internet" and lightweight sites in
general. Although I'm not an active participant in any of the
tilde communities, I really appreciate the commitment to plaintext,
\*NIX, and simple software.
At some point in my browsing of the tildeverse, I stumbled across
Gopher and took a liking to the simple protocol. Surfing
gopherspace is so awesomely fast and simple compared to the slow,
ad-filled, modern web. Better yet, it's totally removed from the
commercialization of the internet. No one is serving content on
Gopher to make money. It's full of art and real, empathetic,
humans.
For my own part, I started serving an ascii dump of the `mdoc(7)`
content on this site over Gopher (via
[`gophernicus(8)`](
https://gophernicus.org)) almost 7 months ago.
However, I was never really happy with how it was organized or
generated (hence the lack of an announcement on the `blog(7)`).
It was the discovery of a fellow `mdoc(7)` website over at
[
https://text.causal.agency] that inspired me to revisit my approach
to publishing a text-only version of this site. I finally replaced
the scripted afterthought of a gopher publisher with a first class
build target and decided to expand the offering from gopher-only to
HTTP(S). I figured someone might prefer to browse it that way
(maybe retro computing enthusiasts?), and with `httpd(8)` already
running, it came basically for free!
## How
I started to write about all the "challenges" I faced in this
process, but really these were all self-imposed problems from
restricting myself to a POSIX subset of BSD `make(1)` (in the name of
[creative coding](creative-coding.html)). I think had I chosen either BSD make with
extensions or GNU make, the build would have been much cleaner, but
with a couple of hacks it's okay as is.
Maybe I'll write about it someday, but it didn't feel worth holding
up this "announcement". The TL;DR: I added another inference rule
for `*.7` -> `*.txt` and moved from a "build in tree" model (where the
source tree was what was served by `httpd(8)`) to a "run the install
target after build" model. The latter is necessary because POSIX
inference rules only build into the current directory and I don't
want text.alexkarle.com users to see the `*.html` there too.
Of course, if you're curious to see how the bits come together, I
publish all of the site source at
[
https://sr.ht/~akarle/alexkarle.com]!
## Update
As of November 15, 2021, text.alexkarle.com was moved entirely to
gopher. See [this blog post](/blog/burrowing.html) for more info.
[Back to blog](/blog)
