FINALLY ON THE 'NET

Finally, this phlog is online. It was meant to be a couple of days 
ago, but I kept fumbling my public keys and by the time I could log 
into the account I didn't have time to do much. Plus it turns out 
that the ancient OpenSSH that I have on this Pentium 1 doesn't 
support any of the new encryption cyphers required, so I have to 
ssh into another machine to ssh/sftp into the server (or just get 
sensible and upload from another PC). Of course it also prompted me 
to finally try compiling a new OpenSSH on a faster machine running 
a similar system, but that meant compiling a newer OpenSSL, which 
required a newer Perl as a compile-time dependancy, which 
thankfully itself compiled without much drama. OpenSSL _just_ 
managed to compile, after disabling multi-thread support (not much 
of an issue for my Pentium), haven't actually started yet on 
OpenSSH though. By the way, the documentation for compiling OpenSSL 
in a non-standard location is very confusing - and does it really 
need so many man pages?

Having just jumped into this phlogging thing, I hadn't set up the 
gophermaps or sorted out how the phlog index would be generated. I 
looked into some of the existing phlog gophermap generator scripts 
(mkphlog by Octotep, Phlogit by Slugmax, both over at sdf.org) but 
they seemed more complex than I needed them to be. At a bare 
minimum this one-liner (split over two lines so that it survives 
wrapping) does the job:

cp phloghead gophermap; for i in `ls -r *.txt`; do echo -e "0$i\t";\
done >> gophermap

That just reads a "phloghead" file containing the header text, then 
appends all of the text file filenames in reverse order (which 
works with the convention of starting each filename with a %Y-%M-%D 
formatted date).

But I wanted to update the home gophermap with the name of latest 
post, plus automatically run "fold" on the latest post. So I ended 
up making a, still very simple, script that I'll put up for 
download at some point soon, called simplemkphlog.sh.

Anyway, I'll tinker away away with gophermaps and SSH in the 
evenings and hopefully get to where I wanted this to be on Sunday 
by the end of the week (which is the way that everything I do tends 
to turn out anyway). The main thing is that I did get (at least 
mostly) here by the end of 2019.

- The Free Thinker