Plog revisited: Example setup

As an example, I am reporting here how I set up a side plog to my main one. For reference, please see my earlier posts about the Plog suite, and its Readme file!

This is exactly the same procedure as needed for initially setting up Plog, except that it is missing the steps of getting the sources and copying them into an appropriate directory, and making sure the scripts are executable. Those steps are described in the Readme file of Plog, though.

In this example, I wanted to set up a plog in the subdirectory ./om (all paths relative to the main plog directory). The converted files (html and text versions) should be written to the directories ../../optohtml and ../../optotext. Therefore these directories need to be created first.

plogrc.template then can be copied into ./om/.plog.rc. I kept everything as in the template, except for the following variables:

# directory to save text files for publication
pubtext='../../optotext'
# directory to save HTML files for publication
pubhtml='../../optohtml'
# title in index file for HTML/blog
indhtmltitle="OptoMors"
# title in RSS file
rsstitle="Optomors feed"
# base name of HTML/blog directory (from outside):
baselink='http://yargo.sdf.org/om'
# prefix for mail subject
subject='[optomors]'

Necessary changes are those for directories and the baselink; the others rather are cosmetics.

Next, I set up the file ./om/ads.txt with an e-mail address for monitoring. Keep in mind to end it with # on a line by itself: for some reason, sometimes the last line is ignored, while the script is searching for addresses. (I suspect different line termination, as I work on Android, Windows and UNIX.)

Finally, I created the directory ./om/Archiv, where Git will save processed posts.

That's it! Now we can save posts (names starting with t as defined in .plog.rc), and running pubnext.sh om or allpub.sh om will process them and make them ready for publication. While working on a post, remember to keep its first line containing just the word DRAFT, as defined in .plog.rc, and remove it when the post is ready.