Gopher File Names 03/05/24
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I really like the way entries are listed in d1337's chronological
index[1]. Specifically, I love that they've put a category or tag of
sorts in brackets before the actual title. Here's an example entry
from that index, as it is displayed in lynx and in VF-1 respectively:
(FILE) 2024-02-27: [assorted] Gopher on a Commodore 64
[1] 2024-02-27: [assorted] Gopher on a Commodore 64
The listing is programatically generated, it seems to me, rather than
just a list of files in a folder. I'm not judging, but noting that as
I use a gopher file that primarily lists files. The source of d1337's
listing looks like this (imagine it on one line if you would):
02024-02-27: [assorted] Gopher on a Commodore 64\
<tab>/users/d1337/assorted/c64-001.txt\
<tab>sdf.org\
<tab>70
My gophermap phlog listings are generated with these lines:
=ls -1p | grep '^0_' | awk '{printf "0%s\t%s\n", $1, $1}'
=ls -1p | grep '/' | awk '{printf "1%s\t%s\n", substr($1, 1, length($1)-1), $1}'
=ls -1pr | grep -v -E 'gophermap|/|^0_' | awk '{printf "0%s\t%s\n", $1, $1}'
And so, they rely on the file names themselves to make sense for the
gopher viewer.
Getting back to what I was appreciating about d1337's listing: the
bracketed category/tag. It adds something to the title, a quick sort
of organization with very little overhead. Take a look at d1337's
listing in a browser to see what I mean. You can visually pick out
things of interest very rapidly. It's almost like having an icon, but
not quite as powerful (not to offend the plain-text-is-beautiful
crowd, of which I am a part, but icons are older than ASCII by
thousands of years at least, and are beautiful too.)
My current file name format is something like this:
2023-10-31_anonymousGopherUpdate.txt
Even though spaces and other characters have been a part of Unix file
names from the start, my DOS background makes them feel icky to me,
and so I avoid them. People have probably already written competing
novel-length paper on the subject, and I won't bother with the
argument, it's just what I prefer. But those categories/tags... those
could fit. And, I might even be fine with those brackets, as they are
a sort of minimal graphical tool.
I don't type my filenames manually, even though they are basic. I have
a bash script that does a few other things for me when I'm writing a
phlog post, and so I just rolled the filename generation into that.
The particular line in question is this one:
text_file=$(date +%F)_$1.txt
Not glamorous, but it works. And as you can quickly see, adding in a
"[category]" would be trivial! It could be passed as $1 and the file
name could be $2.
The only issue is... most of my posts are meandering thoughts. Still,
this post could be [technology], which others could be [retrotech] or
[society] or [politics] or whatever else. The trick is, I suppose,
overcoming two issues: First, the temptation to let the categories
define my writing habits; I have no desire to write about things just
to make my category balance look pretty, but I am *tempted* by that
sort of thing. The second issue would be the temptation to have so
many categories that it's worthless to have categories at all.
In short, if I could keep the pendulum in the middle somewhere, the
bracket categories could be quite useful and pleasant. I think I'll
try it out. My format will probably look something like:
2023-10-31_[gohper]_anonymousGopherUpdate.txt
And I'll probably retroactively add categories/tags to my existing
posts (since I love breaking old links, apparently).
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/d1337/chronological_index
