Apocrypha

Welcome to the /r/teslore apocryphal collection!

What It Is

This site is a project by /u/myrrlyn that aims to migrate the /r/teslore Text Archive to an off-reddit mirror that (a) won’t be affected by user deletions and (b) will have nicer presentation (and maybe discovery?). The goal is to eventually look like myrrlyn’s oeuvre, with rich CSS, inline media, and specialty fonts.

How It Works

We have a scraper that downloads all extant texts from the subreddit archive and stores them as Markdown with YAML frontmatter. These raw files are able to be served directly, but are likely in need of polish and review.

The polish process uses these steps as needed:

  • replace ASCII punctuation (single and double quotes, double and triple hyphens, etc) with their Unicode replacements (left and right single and double quotes, en and em dashes, etc)
  • normalize Markdown formatting (any-underscore <hr> to four-hyphen <hr>, prune the heading tree)
  • normalize inline links to use the bibliography syntax ([text][idx] inline, [idx]: link "title" at end of document)
  • use Markdown footnotes where authors rolled their own
  • cut lines to 80 characters so that the raw file is more easily readable
  • use IAL tag replacement ({:tag="new-html-tag"}) to create semantic HTML for things like cited blockquotes or styled spans
  • remove in-document <h1> titles, as the article template generates them
  • render media inline
  • fix spelling and grammar
  • move out-of-character author notes into the about: metadata

Additionally, metadata must be managed for each article as it is processed:

  • entries in a series need series: and part: keys
  • the title: might be split into a subtitle: key as well
  • remove quotes from values that don’t need them. The quotes are automatically inserted by the scraper due to pessimal input, but most documents don’t require this level of caution.

We hope to eventually have a tagging system so that articles can be grouped by topics they cover. Since there are roughly three thousand posts in the archive, this is currently punted to future work while we (a) determine which tags would even be relevant and (b) sketch out a way to keep tagged documents consistent.

For an example of the disaster that results from even a small data set with unmanaged tags, see myrrlyn’s oeuvre listing. There are seven tags with one member each, and the #apocrypha tag includes over half (13/22) of the hosted articles.

How You Can Help

  1. Clone https://github.com/myrrlyn/apocrypha.es.

    If you’re comfortable installing the Elixir and Erlang programming language runtimes, please do so, then use mix phx.server to run the application. You can view it at http://localhost:5673 and see your work happen live!

  2. Pick some articles in pending/ that you like (perhaps your own! search for author: your_username).

  3. Move them from pending/ to archive/ so that the main collection processor will pick them up.

  4. Make them look like the other articles in archive/, following the steps outlined above.

  5. Submit a pull request!

If you have questions about the process, ideas about things we’ve missed, or basically any feedback, please feel free to ping /u/myrrlyn on reddit. This is a community project and can only be successful with community input.

Can You Add Your Own Posts

Sure, why not. Submit a PR with a new document containing the raw Markdown source of your article (which you can get by editing it, copying out all the text, and cancelling the edit) and the relevant metadata.