Wed 12 June 2024

I've often enjoyed using my tootme script to easily toot from the command-line. The reason I wrote this script is that the excellent toot utility which I had been using to toot from the command-line would just fail ungracefully if it encountered an error (like crossing the benighted 500-character post limit). So, tootme provides a friendly front-end to toot, returning with error messages right inside the editor if something goes wrong, and giving you the temp file location to recover your partially-written toot.

The reason I don't just use a more advanced command-line fediverse utility like tut is that I don't like to have potentially time-wasting utilities on machines I'm trying to get serious work done on.

But how did I get from tootme to blogme (which this very post is being written in right now)? And what in the Stephen Gary Wozniak is miniblogging??

It's a simple progression between two opposite extremes. Just as how Project Gemini sits between the mindless, bloated excess of the modern World Wide Web and the minimalism of Gopher, miniblogging lies between the spur-of-the-moment toot-it-and-forget-it of microblogging and the careful "proofread it a dozen times and make sure that every point has nice footnotes and helpful links, &c." plodding work of writing a formal blog post.
Now don't let the comparison between the two make you think I'm comparing "plodding" blogging to bloated horrible websites. The slow-and-careful work of formal blog posts is a beautiful one, and a worthy endeavour.
I just really wanted to have some way of preserving some of my more worthy (and lengthy) thoughts in a more blog-like form, without the anti-motivating aspects of having to think about tags, categories, formatting, proofreading, and all that jazz.

So, miniblogging aspires to be the best of both worlds. The free, long-format nature of blogging, the delightful low-effort-workflow of tooting.

SO HERE IT IS. BLOGME! It plops you into the $EDITOR of your choice, takes the very first line you type as the title of the blog post, the rest as the body, and sets the tag, category, title, filename, and date automagically.

Soon available on my Codeberg repo, which I would link [right here], but Eyyyyyyyyyyy!!! I'm miniblogging over heeeere!!!

Category: QuickPost Tagged: Computing Non-religious post Productivity QuickPost Writing