c0d3 :: j0rg3

Last we were discussing the structure and design of your own CLI-centric blog platform, we had some crude methods of starting and resuming posts before publishing.

Today, let’s explore a little more into setting up a bloging-friendly environment because we need to either make the experience of blogging easy or we’ll grow tired of the hassle and lose interest.

We can reasonably anticipate that we won’t want to beleaguered with repetitious typing of HTML bits. If we’re going to apply paragraph tags, hyperlinks, codeblocks, etc. with any frequency, that task is best to be simplified. Using Vim as our preferred editor, we will use Tim Pope’s brilliant plug-ins ‘surround’ and ‘repeat’, combined with abbreviations to take away the tedium.

The plug-ins just need dropped into your Vim plugin directory (~/.vim/plugin/). The directory may not exist if you don’t have any plug-ins yet. That’s no problem, though. Let’s grab the plugins:

Expand the archives into the appropriate directories:

Ta-da! Your Vim is now configured to quickly wrap (surround) in any variety of markup. When working on a blog, you might use <p> tags a lot by putting your cursor amid the paragraph and typing yss<p>. The plug-in will wrap it with opening and closing paragraph tags. Move to your next paragraph and then press . to repeat.

That out of the way, let’s take advantage of Vim’s abbreviations for some customization. In our .vimrc file, we can define a few characters that Vim will expand according to their definition. For example, you might use:
ab <gclb> <code class="prettyprint lang-bsh linenums:1">
Then, any time you type <gclb> and bress <enter>, you’ll get:
<code class="prettyprint lang-bsh linenums:1">

The next time that we take a look at blogitecture, we will focus on making the posts convenient to manage from our CLI.

Recently, I ordered a Yubikey and, in the comments section of the order, I promised to write about the product. At the time, I assumed that there was going to be something about which to write: (at least a few) steps of setting up and configuration or a registration process. They’ve made the task of writing about it difficult, by making the process of using it so easy.

Plug it in. The light turns solid green and you push the button when you need to enter the key. That’s the whole thing!

Physically, the device has a hole for a keychain or it can slip easily into your wallet. It draws power from the USB port on the computer, so there’s none stored in the device, meaning it should be completely unfazed if you accidentally get it wet.

Let’s take a look at the device.

> lsusb | grep Yubico


Bus 005 Device 004: ID 1050:0010 Yubico.com Yubikey

> lsusb -v -s5:4

Bus 005 Device 004: ID 1050:0010 Yubico.com Yubikey
Couldn't open device, some information will be missing
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x1050 Yubico.com
  idProduct          0x0010 Yubikey
  bcdDevice            2.41
  iManufacturer           1 
  iProduct                2 
  iSerial                 0 
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2
    wTotalLength           34
    bNumInterfaces          1
    bConfigurationValue     1
    iConfiguration          0 
    bmAttributes         0x80
      (Bus Powered)
    MaxPower               30mA
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        0
      bAlternateSetting       0
      bNumEndpoints           1
      bInterfaceClass         3 Human Interface Device
      bInterfaceSubClass      1 Boot Interface Subclass
      bInterfaceProtocol      1 Keyboard
      iInterface              0 
        HID Device Descriptor:
          bLength                 9
          bDescriptorType        33
          bcdHID               1.11
          bCountryCode            0 Not supported
          bNumDescriptors         1
          bDescriptorType        34 Report
          wDescriptorLength      71
         Report Descriptors: 
           ** UNAVAILABLE **
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
        bmAttributes            3
          Transfer Type            Interrupt
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0008  1x 8 bytes
        bInterval              10

There’s not a great deal to be seen here. As it tells you right on Yubico’s site, the device presents as a keyboard and it “types” out its key when you press the button, adding another long and complex password to combine with the long and complex password that you’re already using.

Keep in mind that this device is unable to protect you from keyloggers, some of which are hardware-based. It’s critically important that you are very, very careful about where you’re sticking your Yubikey. Even Yubico cannot protect us from ourselves.

It’s generally a great idea to have Vim keep backups. Once in awhile, they can really save your bacon.

The other side of that coin, though, is that they can get left behind here and there, eventually causing aggravation.

Here’s a snippet to find and eliminate those files from the current directory down:

This uses find from the current directory down (./) to execute an rm statement on all files with an extension ending in tilde (~)

Thanks for visiting my little spot on the web. This is a Blosxom ‘blog which, for those who don’t know, is a CGI written in Perl using the file-system (rather than a database).

To the CLI-addicted, this is an awesome little product. Accepting, of course, that you’re going to get under the hood if you’re going to make it the product you want. After some modules and hacking, I’m pleased with the result.

My posts are just text files, meaning I start a new one like: vim ~posts/`date +%Y%m%d`.brief.subject.txt

Note: the back-ticks (`) tell the system that you want to execute the command between ticks, and dynamically insert its output into the command. In this case, the command date with these parameters:

1. (+) we’re going to specify a format
2. (%Y) four-digit year
3. (%m) two-digit month
4. (%d) two-digit day

That means the command above will use Vim to edit a text file named ‘20130507.brief.subject.txt’ in the directory I have assigned to the hash of ‘posts’. (using hash this way is a function of Zsh that I’ll cover in another post)

Toss in a line that identifies tags and, since Perl is the beast of Regex, we pick up the tags and make them links, meta-tags, etc.

Things here are likely to change a lot at first, while I twiddle with CSS and hack away at making a Blosxom that perfectly fits my tastes — so don’t be too alarmed if you visit and things look a tad wonky. It just means that I’m tinkering.

Once the saw-horses have been tucked away, I’m going to take the various notes I’ve made during my years in IT and write them out, in a very simple breakdown, aimed at sharing these with people who know little about how to negotiate the command line. The assumption here is that you have an interest in *nix/BSD. If you’ve that and the CLI is not a major part of your computing experience, it probably will be at some point. If you’re working on systems remotely, graphical interfaces often just impede you.

Once you’ve started working on remote machines, the rest is inevitable. You can either remember how to do everything two ways, through a graphical interface and CLI — or just start using the CLI for everything.

So let’s take a little journey through the kinds of things that make me love the CLI.