● Manuscript Render Script

355 2026-08-06 note ♇︎ ♎︎

The writerdeckAn old ThinkPad, wiped down to headless Ubuntu Server: no desktop environment, no display manager, boots straight to a login prompt over SSH or a bare tty. The single purpose is longform writing, a novel draft, a poetry chapbook, a… pushes to a private git repo, one commit per session, and the same discipline as this site's own daily-commit habitMy old /github Beeminder goal tracked commits across every repository on GitHub, until GitHub's API changed to only allow tracking one repository at a time. Most active projects had already moved to GitLab and Source.tube anyway. The repository of this…. Commits are the only telemetry, there's no cloud sync or background daemon watching the manuscript folder.

A post-commit hook does the work, every .wg and .md file in the manuscript tree is concatenated into one plain-text file in the order a table of contents defines, not file-modified time. WordGrinder ships its own wordgrinder-convert for turning its native format into plain text before that concatenation happens.

It's the same as this site's `urlminder.txt` routeA Beeminder integration that counts the words at any publicly accessible URL, normally used with Google Docs. Raw HTML inflates the count, but it's accurate with plain text, which is the reason /urlminder.txt exists as a route on this site,…: read every source file at render time, strip anything that isn't prose, write the total back out as a single growing feed. The same reasoningA static site generator takes markdown and templates and compiles them into plain HTML files with no server-side code and no database. For a digital garden that's meant to be worked on continuously, the boring reliability is a great asset.… applies, boring and deterministic beats clever.

That single file is the thing that actually gets deployed, not the repo. See Obscure Netlify SubdomainURLminder needs a public URL, which rules out anything private. The workaround is obscurity. Deploy the rendered manuscript feed to Netlify under a subdomain that's a long random string rather than a chosen name, eg. x7q2m9vb4k1p.netlify.app. No custom domain, no… for where it ends up once it leaves the ThinkPad.