A blog that is read with curl (curl + blog = clog)!
A clog is the smallest possible instance of a blog I could imagine and has a simple structure. All you need is a folder called clog in the root of your website that contains a file called index. The only other file I have included in the spec at this point is links and is optional. Posts in your clog are just numbered files that contain the text for the post. None of these files have an file extension.
Thats all there is to it.
If you want to get started with your own blog you can lone the clog directory in this repo to the root of your website and look in the post for further instruction on what to do.
clog/
|__ index <- This i the home page of your clog
|__ links <- for linking to other clogs and such
|__ 1 <- a post
|__ 2 <- another post
This is my current suggested syntax for the index page.
- it should have one line that reads
Posts:\n, every line after that is a 'link' to a post. - A link to a post has the format
<POST_ID> : Post title
Everything before the Posts: tag is just header text to introduce your clog.
As you add more clog posts add them to the bottom of your index file, this way when a reader gets your index the most recent posts will be the ones they see first.
While not necessary the new.sh can be run to easily create the template for a new post for you! It counts how many files there are in the directory and then creates a new post with that number as an ID and adds the appropriate line to the end of the index file for you!
This is a really simple clog reading client in a bash script! You can check to see if a website has a clog by typing in its url, you dont even need to put the /clog/index on the end as it does it for you. Copy this somewhere and pop an alias in your .bashrc to run it and you have an almost seamless way of reading clogs in your terminal.
The web is getting a bit fat and bandwidth is getting used up at an alarming rate. Blog posts about bloat problems on the web are themselves running into multiple megabytes in size just to present you with 500 or so words of content. This is obscene! A blog, in its most distilled form is a text document. The clog was a simple experiment in stripping the blog back to its smallest possible size. Due to the nature of the clog it is also naturally accessible to any maching that can run curl (most machines) including very old machines that would struggle now just displaying an average post from medium. You can read your clog from a computer that doesnt even have a GUI!