These columns tend to be somewhat longer than toots or tweets, but still shorter and less formal than typical blog posts or feature articles. I don’t intend for them to have the same level of polish as longer pieces, and yet I can’t seem to get away from tweaking them a bit after they’re published. I even wrote a trivial little script so that changes I make after publication will get automatically incorporated into the live Quartz 4-driven site.
For the record:
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'
LTIME=0
site="twoprops.net"
dir="/home/twoprops/quartz"
while true
do
ATIME=`stat -c %Z $dir/content`
if [[ "$ATIME" != "$LTIME" ]]
then
echo
echo "-- $(date +%Y%m%d@%H:%M) $site --"
cd $dir
npx quartz build
LTIME=$ATIME
fi
sleep 5
done
(Yes, I know that Quartz has the ability to do this more efficiently while publishing to its internal web server, but I’ve found that the feature crashes frequently and is too unreliable for my needs.)
It seems as though it should generally be possible to make sure something is publication-ready the first time. What I’m after with this project, though, is the ability to publish quickly and without a lot of prepublication anxiety. Being able to dash something off as one would on a microblogging platform yet having a bit longer form and the ability to polish it a bit after the fact suits me.
—2p