Reconsidering Publishing to the Internet

A few weeks ago, I took all of my published pages offline and just left my blog intact (although without styling). I was increasingly unhappy with my “publishing strategy” (or the lack thereof), but also increasingly at unease about the state of the internet, especially the aggressive scrapping of content by AI bots. This week I deleted the git repository that feeds Jachère to have a complete clean wipe.

I can’t do much about the scrapper bots in my current setup. Jachère is hosted as a static website on Codeberg, where I also have all of my other git repositories. That’s pretty cool, but it also bars me¹ from setting up any AI tar-pits or other sabotaging mechanisms². Adding to that is the ongoing rise of fascists and autocrats in Europe and North America. I’m not worried about what I said (assholes will stay assholes), but in what state I published my material. With capitalism and fascists preying on our online content, I just can’t have my stuff lying around like that. I felt the need to have more control and be better reflected on what I push online.

Following a digital garden or thinking in public inspired approach, I was utterly sloppy in how I put things online—more of a dump and forget. I had several markdown-based note folders, which became messy and I repeatedly had to clean them up each and one separately. At one point I consolidated them, ending up with one large mess instead³. My note management never really recovered from that, and I just kept going. I learned to deal with the mess productively, and it works really well for my approaches to reading and writing. I was also cool with having that mess online. No shame in that, and maybe somebody finds a nugget or two. But I guess that doesn’t work any more.

In the past, I tried a few approaches to publish from markdown and most of them are pretty neat. The Webpage HTML Export plugin for Obsidian does a nice job, Quartz is really great, and I collected a bunch of other frameworks and tools under Awesome Small Web Publishing. At one point I even wrote my own publishing scripts with which I can bake my notes into a website with pandoc, aptly named pancake.sh. It always was a struggle between having to adapt my organization or files and having control over the process and output, while not having to invest to much time and energy. Quartz is great, but it overloads my page with so much material I don’t want. I’m not a big fan of convention over configuration, but I still like convenience.

I took the chance for a small redesign of Jachère (now in spring colours, like it or not) and simplifying my publishing process. I still rely on pandoc, but I trigger it directly from Obsidian with the help of the Enhancing Export plugin. My export template has the following parameters:

-f ${fromFormat} --resource-path="${currentDir}" --resource-path="${attachmentFolderPath}" --template="templates/default.html" -s -o "${outputPath}" -t html

The Enhacing Export plugin allows for letting a script run after the export, which is perfect to clean up the produced html. I only need to replace the link endings from .md to .html for which sed is well-fitted⁴.

sed -i -E "s/href=\"(.*)\\.md\"/href=\"\\1.html\"/g" "${outputPath}"

I use a custom html template for the export. Nothing fancy, but just making sure that I can include my style sheets and script files. I rely on some javascript for some of the dynamic parts, like navigation or footer. Since I don’t know if I will change the menu in the future and don’t want to re-render all pages again, I create it dynamically with some vanilla javascript.

Publishing

Now that that’s done, my last thought is about what I actually want to have published. My former dump and forget approach didn’t add much value to the internet, or did it? Most of those fragmented notes and half-baked thoughts were of value to me, of course. But without the process that led to them, and without my mental model in place that my notes organization expands on, it was probably more often than not just scrambled garbage.

Maybe this is also an aspect of increased importance to me since I’m writing and publishing academically. Perhaps I became more sensible on how I produce and publish my thoughts and perspectives. I guess that is a reflection to ponder upon another time. Right now, I only have a few blog posts online, but I want to bring them all back again. I also want to re-publish some of my notes and how-tos, and certainly some of my articles. But I will have to go through them, fix stuff or clean them⁵ up and often optimize the images.

To end this note, I’m also happy to mention that a text I started in 2023 finally got published. The process took extra long, since it first was a report on the Confoederatio Ludens project, but then mutated into a peer-reviewed article. Adding to that was a translation from English to Chinese by my good friend Tao Fan. The text Preserving Original Digital Cultural Heritage goes into “Applications and Challenges of Computational Methods in Digital Game Research”. Kind of a crossover between digital humanities and video game studies.