2025-01-29 -- a new beginning
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Having rekindled my interest in Gopher in early 2025-01, I thought
about different document formats again during the last weeks. First I
thought about going back to HTML: nothing beats its richness in
semantics. Then I handed in homework in TeX on 2025-01-27 -- I had
used roff for previous hand-ins -- and was stunned by its beauty,
especially for the maths. I have been working on an introduction to
one-time pads lately, so I prepared a draft in TeX. On 2025-01-28, I
used LuaLaTeX for the first time to compile it -- I had preferred
XeLaTeX in previous years. The output was stunning of course. But the
questions are always the same: which files should I track in Git?
Should I really force my readers to use a PDF viewer to see my
writing? Are all of those kilobytes really necessary?

Then I gophered around a bit and stumbled upon stug's phlog [1].
That's it, I thought. I liked the simplicity of the format, the
patience of the paragraphs. I don't need to compile pretty papers
with TeX -- if the writing is kind and interesting, then people will
read text in plain as well, line by line. And so I thought about
starting this phlog.

I had already had a feed of plain text articles, ordered by date, in
late 2023, and an "HTML Journal" with short articles ordered by time
in early 2024-01. Naturally, having anything ordered by date aids the
"stream" in eroding the "garden" philosophy. But my readers want to
know about my latest writing, and sometimes it's hard to foresee
which hierarchical path in the "garden" a new thought will best fit
to in the end.

I like stug's use of tildes to underline and have copied it here.
Instead of 70 columns, I use 69 here -- I intend to write a more
detailed survey on line lengths some other time. I have also copied
having dates as part of the title, but use a numerical format to ease
sorting -- just like Alex Schroeder does it. I have also copied some
details from stug's nanorc for Gopher, like hard-wrapping (so that I
can just keep on typing without having to hit ^J all the time); I
have adapted it as follows:

     set autoindent
     set breaklonglines
     set constantshow
     set fill 69
     set linenumbers
     set trimblanks

I update the gophermap with the "update" script in the phlog
directory. In the spirit of brutalism -- its true spirit, which
means: exposing functionality instead of hiding it, rather than:
adding effort to look worse -- you can access it with the appropriate
selector as well.

[1] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/stug/phlog