Chip, Chop, Chip, Chop, Top-10 Done
Learn how to use Linux, Python, vim & git (LPvg) to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies. Follow the Unix philosophies to make sure your commands are universal and portable. Read about Levinux, Pipulate, and how to use them to make SEO deliverables. Plus, discover how to write from the first person perspective, keep your content short, and link your homepage index.md to the new include.
I'm wrangling new stuff and practicing what I preach
By Michael Levin
Friday, April 28, 2023
I am in the process of wrangling a bunch of new stuff and practicing what I preach. I’ve given up the “LPVG SEO” on my homepage, because although while I believe in the Linux, Python, vim & git (LPvg) platform as a distinctly pragmatic tool-set worth learning as a group to make yourself old-school obsolescence-resistant, but Levinux and Pipulate, those are some cool made-up words. And they’re mine. I’ve actually got something interesting to show on each.
Clearly, what’s shaping up here is that Levinux won’t go away, and that becomes like the running joke. Kick Linux’s Terminal-based Shell interface with no investment more than a 20MB download and un-archiving it to a folder on your Windows or Mac desktop. It’s even less investment than the Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) which you can turn on by getting Ubuntu from the Microsoft Store. It’s ultimately best to do that, but before you do, you can try Levinux and sample the ssh program and editing in vi (not even vim or NeoVim).
So there’s Unix and Linux built into a lot of stuff. Linux won just in time for radically new stuff to be designed by AI, or at very least, machine learning assisted. Well, my answer to that is an API is an API. Just because better underlying, superhumanly optimized amazing new hardware or whatever is underneath there, but we still need to talk to it. Human-machine interface languages have not gone obsolete.
The Unix philosophies still apply in the post-AI-world, because issuing brief commands on a command-line interface, referencing things we call files, and piping outputs to inputs and all that happy stuff scales, what? Infinitely. It’s designed to be universal and portable that way. Timeless it is, that Unix API. And so, Levinux. Get used to text-based Linux Terminal. It’s tricky, but not unable to be overcome. Approach and tackle it like a game. That kind of problem-solving skill will pay off.
Pipulate? Well, there was a time when I thought that Levinux would be the Noah’s Ark of a code execution environment for Pipulate. Levinux being a qemu PC emulator-based virtual machine as it is could have done that, but the performance and development environment would have been terrible. So while Levinux is a good easy intro to that old school environment, it’s better to get it through (if you’re a Windows user) WSL, activated as WSL2 in all its glory by installing Ubuntu through the Microsoft store. There are still some conditions where Hypervisor has to be turned separately on.
So, Pipulate literally ran on Levinux, and it was a beautiful vision with terrible performance. And so eventually, Microsoft’s WSL platform became good enough to host Pipulate. And Pipulate itself which had been in continual transition of what it was, at one time providing its own Python webserver and a bookmarklet system for your browser, it has most recently become an instance of JupyterLab running with particular github repos pre-cloned into location on a Linux VM.
Linux virtual machines provide utility much like Docker, but better because it’s a fully configurable Linux system with none of the Docker compositing limitations. Why have the extra API-layer of containerized apps if you can just install your apps straight-up on the instance of Linux running on a VM. Sometimes you want your components tightly-coupled for overall simplicity and performance, especially if you routinely rebuild your server from scratch using server-build script.
And so after a variety of iterations of Pipulate, it has most recently settled on being an SEO deliverable-maker… the secret sauce you can charge clients a lot of money for knowing how to use and using on their behalf. They’re busy and don’t have time for all that site marketing stuff, so they just need to hire someone. You need a strategy to roll our content and to make your voice heard in your space.
Push yourself up to that next level. Chip, chip, chip, chop, chop, chop.
Chip away and reveal the sculpture, chip, chip, chip. Chop your journal into pages, posts, articles, entries or whatnot, chop, chop, chop.
Chip, chop, chip, chop.
That says it just about right. If you’re not chipping, you ought not be chopping or it’s just babbling. Today’s chop? Well I did a few chops today already, but there’s more in store… maybe, I hope.
Interestingly, the new in-vim buffer for the chop.py program is now the
keystroke :b ch[tab auto-complete]
These are the things that get into muscle memory and become important. There is a muscle-memory address to bring up that particular file for editing now, and so changes are easier because you can instantly jump there.
From there, I want to find where the Index page is being written, so the
keypress is /index page[Enter]
I like these backticks. It makes it easier to say inline in a sentence things which I would in the past have broken up over multiple lines as a matter of style, but this flows much better. Less interrupted and better use of white space versus paragraph grey.
Okay, then next? I just repeat the loop that writes out the whole article index include and make one that does the exact same thing, but limits it to 10 articles. Now link the homepage index.md to the new include…