No-break Case
Humans become excited when they get to explain things. It turns out that you don’t even need someone to explain things to; they let you publish anything on the internet with no expectations at all about anyone seeing it. This is a great option because the best audience is a captive audience, and no captive is more secure than the purely notional audience.
In 2022, I began this website because I was fascinated by those using their Neocities pages as curated hubs juxtaposing their interests relevant to their interests. On the modern internet, people mostly frequent a handful of platforms hosting heterogeneous content in uniform storefronts, but the bespoke husks, fruits, detritus, and labors of thousands of peculiar specialties are still there. It doesn’t take much money to put up articles about Minoan snake goddesses or alien abduction, so such things aren’t hard to find. For efficiency, Marginalia search can cut right past anything a sane person would pay money for you to see.
Fixated on all of that, I made a rudimentary homepage, but my concentration waned and the site went untouched for two years. Much love to the twelve loyal followers who I presume have expectantly watched over its slumber. Your waiting was not in vain! Maybe some of you aren’t even bots. Nowadays my interest is not the web itself (although that is rekindling somewhat), but in putting myself to work. At the start of the year, I promised myself I would stop sitting on all the notes and drafts I have laying around and would at last smuggle something into the world. Two weeks ago, I remembered this site and got to work.
Not everything is done yet. The journal theme is abysmal. I had to rush to save the site before my whims changed. Much like a baby, I can’t ignore it once it’s big enough to talk. I found a static site generator* suiting my needs, so tagging and archiving posts is no problem, neither is an RSS feed. Despite a charismatic plot of real-estate set aside for it, at the moment there is a paucity of fiction* here. My perfectionism has kept that out of reach of the time-frame.
Static Site Generation
I only recently became aware of static site generators. A typical blog uses scripting to maintain a database of posts with associated tags, dates, &c, which dynamically build directories to organize and search posts. On a static website, these directories have to exist as pre-compiled web pages. Doing all that by hand is bore.
Some people use extensive generators to build entire sites. I wanted a more minimalist tool that automates the bookkeeping, but leaves everything else to me and doesn’t make too many assumptions. Perhaps I’ll adapt it for fiction?*
Org was a less standard insistence of mine. Generators expect plaintext, usually Markdown, but I originally wanted Org because it supports many export formats, and maybe I want to typeset some of my work in TeX, just for fun. Org is also a ubiquitous part of my workflow, so there’s a lot of potential for integration.*
I settled on the Emacs package “org-static-blog”. It’s lightweight and dead simple. Even my rudimentary Elisp skill will suffice for any necessary modifications.
Org
Org is a plaintext markup format for taking notes, writing documents, and handling data. It’s similar to Markdown, but where Markdown is a breezy markup for documents and prose, Org is an extendable, interaction-oriented format. At its simplest, it’s like Markdown with minor syntactic differences. Beyond the basics, Org supports agendas, text-substitution macros, and live code-execution.
A prose manuscript needs paragraphs, emphasis, and not much else. Org is overkill, but its beauty is that you can use it for anything anyways. My agenda, “spreadsheets”, and my extensive notes are all possible due to the Org ecosystem, and they are all integrated with one another.
The functionality comes with the tools you edit a file with. This doesn’t have to be Emacs, but it probably should be. Hm…I can’t go recommending Emacs to everyone. That’s dangerous. Well, I can’t speak to any other editor, but Obsidian has a plugin for Org support. There are also mobile apps for it, but that sounds hellish.
Ultimately, while Org’s true power comes from the editors interacting with it, all Org documents are plaintext, and are perfectly readable and modifiable with nothing more than Notepad. This, too, is a part of its beauty.
no break case
How unfortunate that Org tags are conventionally written in snake case. Fiction has to be presented with ritual quarantine so as to allow for the delusive fiat of textual independence (blogs can scarcely pretend to such dignity—these things are always an affectation, but you must indulge them tactfully). Tags are questionable on their face. But if there are to be tags…snake case?
We all agree the animal cases are unseemly. Of the two, snake case is the least disagreeable and puts the underscore* to a natural use. While I accept every programming language has its idioms, in the world of aesthetics, it is the cute little kebab case which is preferable.
Kebab case is all lowercase, with inter-word spaces replaced with hyphens. It is the idiomatic style of Lisp. For example, the ID “foo bar” would be written in camel case as fooBar, in snake case foo_bar, and in kebab case as foo-bar. The terms thus explained, my point is self-evident.
Such “cases” are pragmatic deviations from the preference of natural orthography; perhaps a compromise can be reached? In the formal syntax of a programming language, spaces are surely more useful as delimiters than as components of IDs, but there is more than one space character. If a language distinguishes between the ASCII space (which you surely recognize: “ ”) and the no-break space (“ ”), then you could write IDs in no break case. The aesthetic and the necessary would coincide, and programmers could at last shake hands with the Chicago Manual of Style.
Well anyways, I’ll just use one-word tags.
The Underscore
Because you are only a webpage (which might incidentally be read by a human from time-to-time), nothing can stop me from explaining anything I want to you.
True to its name, the underscore was meant to score under. On a typewriter, you could overstrike one character atop another. The original purpose of the tilde, grave, and caret (properly a circumflex) was for creating accented letters such as “ñ”, “è”, or “.̃”. They were dead keys which did not advance the carriage when typed, so the typist simply overstruck the accent with a letter on the next keypress. When ASCII was standardized, these typewriter keys were included, but computer displays of the time could not render two characters on top of each other. Thus, the dead accent keys became spacing characters, and programmers, markup language designers, and emoticon craftspeople have since devised for them many ingenious uses. (By happy coincidence, the tilde also resembled both the swung dash and the mathematical approximation sign.)
The underscore—too—became purely a spacing character, but like its friend the pipe (|), its semantics have always been subordinate to the primordial, visual thrill of horizontal and vertical lines. For as long as people have prepared documents, there has been the need to draw lines across the page.
Say, something seems off about “(|)”…
Snake case can not be harshly begrudged just because it is ugly. It is natural and human to draw a line to explicate what was meant as a graceful vacancy. I will try to bear this in mind when I next look at a curly bracket language (or, God forbid, Python). Not only is it a reasonable pragmatic solution in-context, but it is human. It is unpleasant, but it is human.
Fiction
Tagging fiction when the archive is entirely my own isn’t useful unless I am prolific. So that can be a challenge it its own right: write so much that organizing it all is a massive headache.