01 Plain Text Programs

Hi. I'm here to talk about Plain Text Programs, what they are, what they do, why they're good, and why they're not for everything. Right up front I'm requesting feedback on what I have to say. I'm on Mastodon and I'll start a thread for each podcast or you can reach me by email.

My Mastodon address is
@hairylarry@gamerplus.org

My profile is at
https://gamerplus.org/@hairylarry

And my email is
hairylarry@deltaboogie.com

Also you can Network With Hairy Larry at
https://deltaboogie.net.

In the future I plan on doing podcasts on specific Plain Text Programs, some that I wrote and some that were written by others. Any program that I will discuss will be licensed with a free culture license.

The first thing I want to emphasize about Plain Text Programs is that there's no database like SQL or LLM. All text data is written in plain text files stored on a file system.

Now, I love databases. Before I retired I was a database programmer. And as a database programmer I learned a lot about the difficulties maintaining programs that rely on databases. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with a database that's just not reasonable to try with plain text. Now that I'm retired I don't really want to work that hard anymore. I want programming to be easy and fun.

Plain text does not mean there can't be images or other media. Image files like .jpg or .png can be stored in the file system just like text files. No worries.

A big advantage of Plain Text Programs is portability. To back up a working program you copy the directory tree that holds the program's files. To install or restore a Plain Text Program copy the tree onto a system or server.

I usually work on Linux using the PHP programming language. This is of course my preference. Any language running on any file system can be used to write Plain Text Programs.

My minimum install will usually have a configuration file, at least one program file, and a set of text files.

Some of the Plain Text Programs I use all the time that I wrote are

Websites

• Dirt Simple Photo Gallery
• Plain Text Blog
• Not Actually Plain Text Blog
• Network With Hairy Larry

Internet Radio

• MixRemix - Creative Commons Jazz
• KGPL

Utilities

• Backup The Web Server

I also use Plain Text Programs that other programmers wrote

• Music Folder Player
  https://github.com/ltguillaume/music-folder-player

• Free PHP File Directory Script
  https://halgatewood.com/file-directory-list

• Simple Image Browser
  https://github.com/SammysHP/SimpleImageBrowser

Links to these programs are in the script.

So these are mostly websites or web applications but Plain Text Programs do not have to be outward facing. They can just be an easy program that you write to automate a task that you have to do periodically. Like my Backup The Web Server program that I wrote in bash.

I write my Plain Text Programs websites so that updates and additions are made with FTP. FTP is a well established secure way to transfer files from your development system to your web server. Another good option, particularly for static websites that are generated on the development system and then mirrored up to the server, is rsync.

I believe that simplicity is the key. I have written complicated Plain Text Programs including the social network writing game, Collab. But I think a simple one page or few pages design fits the plain text paradigm better.

Well, I'm going to call this a wrap for now. I plan on covering specific Plain Text Programs in future podcasts and I may occasionally step back and look at the big picture or discuss ideas and specifications for future projects.

Thanks for listening. I appreciate all your comments.

You can find the plain text script with the link to the comment thread and all other links at home.gamerplus.org, a Not Actually Plain Text Blog.

Comment thread link.
https://gamerplus.org/deck/@hairylarry/113142858145586294