BREYDON’s methods of writing internet

For a couple of decades, I cast the raggedy knits of Hypertext Markup Language (H.T.M.L.) and Cascading Style Sheets (C.S.S.) that strung my webpages. Typing directly in H.T.M.L. is still, I reckon, the best way to make a small website — especially for the novice!

So why do it any differently? In my case, a few things have changed:

1. Living pages grew much more numerous.
2. The use of my fingers has diminished.
3. I am no longer all that interested in the web.

Now most of what I write for the internet goes into one continuous lump. This file is easily arranged using a format called “Org”. I bung in some annotations (for special details such as links, dates, or captions), and then use Org mode (in the text‐editing software Emacs) to generate a variety of documents for each section.

As of February 2022, new and revised pages around here are produced with:

• Carsten Dominik’s Org version 9·5
• Justin Abrahms’ ox-gemini.el version 0, for gemini hypertext
• Jonathan Kew & Khaled Hosny’s XeLaTeX; and other packages in TeX Live 2021, for print‐oriented formats
• LilyPond 2·18·2, for music notation
• some ad hoc hacks of my own making

Though it would be lovely to breeze along on sophisticated, automated processing of everything, I just manually export specific passages as needed. :EXPORT_FILE_NAME: paths ensure correct placement within the directory structure and can be used to label draft runs.

* Pronouns & titles   :about:pronouns:
:PROPERTIES:
:custom_id: pronouns
:EXPORT_FILE_NAME: breydon.id.au/DRAFT_about/pronouns/index
:header-args:text: :tangle breydon.id.au/about/pronouns/gophertag :noweb-ref pronouns-gophertag :exports none
:EXPORT_TITLE: BREYDON’s pronouns
:EXPORT_OPTIONS: toc:nil
:EXPORT_DATE: 08 November 2020
# and so on
:END:

Before going online, I also export the source file as one whole unit (afresh), and introduce the newly generated updates to my other material for publication.

rsync --exclude 'DRAFT*' --update --recursive --verbose ~/breydon.id.au/breydon.id.au ~/public/

The revised sections then sit in ~/public/breydon.id.au/ waiting to be copied to the server. Along with the updated documents, this folder holds unchanged, earlier exports and things like audio and hand‐coded files.