I have seen a little bit of discussion lately in phlogs and on the Fediverse
about the software some people use for phlogging. There are a couple of
frameworks that people on SDF have put together to automate updating Gophermaps,
etc., and I think I read about someone hacking the static blogging framework
Hugo to build gopherholes.
For my part, I phlog totally manually, using vim and nothing else. I write each
entry by hand on my local machine, scp it to my SDF home directory, then ssh
into the SDF to edit the gophermap by hand, before finally using a gopher client
to check that I got everything right.
I started out this way simply out of ignorance of the other options out there,
but I decided fairly early on to keep doing things this way quite deliberately.
It's not at all that I oppose the automation of repetitive work in general, I'm
usually all for it. But in the case of maintaining a gopherhole in 2017, doing
things simply, slowly and carefully by hand using no special software seemed
emminently suitable. I appreciate the meditative and ritual aspects of doing
this same procedure for each post.
This is not, at all, intended as a criticism of folks who automate their
phlogging. I just wanted to share my belief that sometimes it's acceptable,
perhaps even important, to choose how to do some computing based not on how fast
or easy it is, but on how it makes you feel.
