Plog reviewed

Plog reviewed

[1]Plog has recently seen a major overhaul, and I consider it finally
usable for others.

I will try to add some explanations to aid in understanding the whole
system. The following examples will probably be converted into part of
README.md in the Plog suite. As soon as I will find sufficient time...
`;-)

_Please also have a look at the previous blog entry, introducing Plog!_

New and Improved

* only one configuration script, making upgrades much easier
* scripts in one global directory, but configuration local to each
working directory, allowing for independent projects
* external conversion script for handling certain UTF8 characters (or
whatever abbreviations or special chars)
* better logging
* transparent use of conversion scripts, permitting replacement by
cat for pure plaintext mode

Examples

I use the plog suite now regularly for two different setups from one
single installation.

E-Mail Newsletter

One project consists in a personal newsletter going to a handful of
addresses. In its configuration ( .plog.rc ) stored in the project
directory Newsletter, the values for the publication directories
pubdirhtml and pubdirtext are set to '' so that they get ignored, and
therefore no files are written into any publication directory.

A cronjob runs pubnext.sh Newsletter twice a week, resulting in two
newsletters per week processed and sent. As long as I am working on
one, I keep the word DRAFT at the beginning of its first line.

Newsletter looks like this:
A/
plog.rc
_pubnext.html
_pubnext.log
_pubnext.txt
ad.txt
t150110-news.md
t150112-test.md

A is the archive directory where processed posts are saved. ad.txt
contains the addresses of the newsletter recipients, and looks like
# addresses
[email protected]
[email protected]

The _pubnext.* files are for internal use by the scripts; _pubnext.log
contains the detailed log.

The contents of .plog.rc look like this:
pubtext=''
lentext=24
indtext='gophermap'
indtexthead=''
pubhtml=''
lenhtml=12
indhtml='list.html'
indhtmltitle=""
rsshtml='rss.xml'
rsstitle='feed'
rssdesc='recent entries'
baselink='http://example.com'
subject='Newsletter:'
fprefix='t'
draft='DRAFT'
arch='Archiv'
htmlhead='<HTML><BODY>'
htmlfoot="</BODY></HTML>"
logfile='_pubnext.log'
convert0="$mydir/convchars.sh"
convert1="$mydir/mrkdwn.pl"
convert2='lynx -display_charset=US-ASCII -force-html -dump'
mailer=mailx
tmpf1='_pubnext.html'
tmpf2='_pubnext.txt'
lockf='.pubnext.lock'

Blog

This blog itself is handled by a different project. It also has a
newsletter section, but it is sending posts to just one of my own
addresses, so that I can monitor its correct functioning.

A daily cronjob calls allpub.sh blog, which in turn repeatedly calls
pubnext.sh on the working directory blog, and afterwards (re)generates
the index files list.html (for the HTML/blog version) and gophermap
(for the text/gopherlog) version, and in addition the feed rss.xml for
the HTML version as well. These files are saved two levels above the
working directory in ../../pubdirhtml/ and ../../pubdirtext.

To compartmentalize the scripts, there is an additional daily cronjob,
which in turn updates the directories facing the internet. It is based
on allsync.sh, which is also included in the Plog suite for reference.

The directory blog looks quite similar to the one in the previous
section:
Archiv/
plog.rc
_pubnext.html
_pubnext.log
_pubnext.txt
ad.txt
t15119-plog.md
template.md

The source text you are now reading was put into the file
t15119-plog.md. When it will be processed, pubnext.sh will move it (via
Git, see below) into the archive directory Archiv.

And here is the configuration script .plog.rc for this project:
adds='ad.txt'
pubtext='../../pubdirtext'
lentext=24
indtext='gophermap'
indtexthead='recent entries'
pubhtml='../../pubdirhtml'
lenhtml=12
indhtml='list.html'
indhtmltitle="Y's blog"
rsshtml='rss.xml'
rsstitle="Y's blog feed"
rssdesc='recent blog entries'
baselink='http://yargo.sdf.org/blog'
subject='(blogmonitor)'
fprefix='t'
draft='DRAFT'
arch='Archiv'
htmlhead='<HTML><BODY>'
htmlfoot="</BODY></HTML>"
logfile='_pubnext.log'
convert0="$mydir/convchars.sh"
convert1="$mydir/mrkdwn.pl"
convert2='lynx -display_charset=US-ASCII -force-html -dump'
mailer=mailx
tmpf1='_pubnext.html'
tmpf2='_pubnext.txt'
lockf='.pubnext.lock'

Notes

Please keep in mind that the .plog.rc file in fact is a shell script,
which will be executed ("sourced") by allpub.sh and pubnext.sh, and
therefore strange things may happen if you do not correctly pair '...'
or "...", or if you make other syntactic mistakes.

Git

_The following paragraphs require understanding of Git. If you lack
this, please learn about Git basics, from any of the good resources on
the net._

There are no .git files in the directories presented in the examples,
because in my case, their parent directory is version controlled by
Git.

pubnext.sh handles the core Git functionality, as it tries to do a git
pull before changing anything in the working directory (i.e, to update
changes from a possible remote directory), and it does a git commit and
a git push afterwards.

Currently, a local only repository without remote might not be handled
gracefully. If you have such a setup, try the scripts, but be prepared
to do some hacking. In case you desperately need it, but cannot get it
working, feel free to contact me; I might try to add the necessary
logic.

Why cronjobs and not Git hooks?

You may ask yourself why I rely on cronjobs to launch the different
scripts, and not on Git itself by making use of hooks. Here are my
reasons:
* Some people may not want to use Git at all, but still would like to
have a simple setup to allow for publishing Markdown formatted
posts simultaneously to a blog and a glog (HTML and pure text), and
possibly send them as newsletters.
* Setting up Git hooks is a slightly tricky task, especially if you
are only running Git in userspace. If your system permits addition
of Git hooks, it will most probably already allow you to install
cronjobs, and the latter in general are a much more useful tool, at
least in my opinion.
* Having defined publication times (slots) helps me in writing posts:
A real and automatic (merciless) deadline is one of the best
motivators!
__________________________________________________________________

If you make it that far, please tell me what you think about Plog! And
good luck for your writing endeavours!

References

1. https://gitlab.com/yargo/plog