Way back in 1999 I read Neal Stephenson’s pamphlet In the Beginning ! Was the Command Line and decided I should and would have Linux running on my clamshell iBook. Needless to say this was (a) a foolish idea and (b) not entirely trivial in those dark OS 9-days. Still, I somehow managed with the help op PPC Linux and was proudly wearing their T-shirt (at least for a couple of weeks in early 2000). Fortunately, as a brief OS X history recalls, OS X was released March 24, 2001 and put an end to my Linux-folly and I’m pretty certain even Neal Stephenson is on Mac OSX these days.
Needless to say I couldn’t resist installing the Wordpress CLI-theme the moment I spotted it! A command line interface to your blog! awesome! If you want to have a go at the original version, take a look at Rod McFarland’s blog. Just type ‘ls’ to the prompt and you’ll be hooked. Or you can have a look at the command line interface of NeverEndingBooks by going to the left sidebar and clicking CLI under the ‘Command Line Version’ header (don’t be afraid you can always come back by clicking on the GUI-interface over there). My design is black on a light-gray background and is no where near as cool as the original theme but it was the only quick way around some limitations of the CLI-theme.
The CLI-theme operates as a front-end via a small interpreter which draws the information directly from the WordPress-database. As a result you loose the effect of all post-processing by plugins such as Markdown and LatexRender two of the plugins I use most! I could still live with the idea that pure LaTeX was served to a CLI-environment between tex-tags, but surely I didn’t want to loose all my links! The quick (and extremely dirty) way around it was to resubmit the relevant part of the HTML-source files of the GUI-frontend posts to the WP-database. And to serve the same LaTeX-gifs to the GUI and CLI interface I needed the backgound to be rather light gray (taking #BDBDBD gray would have been much nicer wrt. the cool rasterized grayed-images but then some of the more recent LaTeX-gifs became partially unreadable). Oh, and in the process I had to update the permalink structure, thereby wrecking allmost all internal reference-links (but I’ll sort them out soon, I promise).
So, a lot of work for a rather meagre result. What do I like about the CLI-interface (apart from old time nostalgia)? I really like the searching facility. Just type ’search yourword’ to the prompt and it will give you all posts containing that word (much quicker than in the GUI-interface) and if you remember at least one word from a post-title, feeding it to the prompt will give you the entire post (or a list of posts if the same word appears in different posts). Try out typing ‘Perelman’ to see what I mean. Besides, bots don’t seem to know what to do with the CLI-interface so for the few days I had this theme as my default theme I was alone on NeverEndingBooks mast of the time (which helped a lot having to change that many posts). So, whenever I want to have the site to myself I’ll just change the default theme from now on.
Still, I did put back the old GUI as default because the CLI-theme still has a few drawbacks. Such as, it is impossible to write a sizable comment (not that too many of you do this, but anyway) and some other quirks. Still Rod McFarland is working on a version 2 (and even set up a google-group for those who want to code along, and maybe I’ll join the effort) which promises a great improvement and I’m rather confident that by version 3.14 it will be in a state that I’ll have the CLI-interface as my default. Until then, I’ll keep up the two front-ends and allow you to toggle as you like (your browser will remember your preference).
I realize most of you are youngsters and not of my cpu2 generation so have a hard time imagining how exiting a command line prompt is. Fortunately, Neal Stephenson has made the full text of “In the beginning ! was the command line” available as a free download. Print it out and enjoy!
google, latex, latexrender, mac, markdown, OSX, PPC, wordpress
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Posted in general
Written on Wed, 07 February 2007 at 9:43 am
Tags: google, latex, latexrender, mac, markdown, OSX, PPC, wordpress
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