I realised that my blog and its content, even though very simple and lightweight, are only accessible using a full-fledged web browser. I thought it would be interesting if my blog posts were available to be read using an even simpler interface, cURL!

To make this work, I made a very simple Jekyll plugin that automatically generates a “raw” page for every post I create. These raw pages are available by prepending /raw to the URL of my posts.

Try it out:

curl https://theread.me/raw/raw-permalinks-for-accessibility/
curl https://theread.me/raw/embodying-the-avatar-videogames/
curl https://theread.me/raw/rust-box-str-vs-string/

You can get a raw listing of my blog posts at /raw/:

curl https://theread.me/raw/

To make this easily readable on small screens and terminals, I used vim’s text-width setting to make sure my lines do not exceed 80 characters:

:set tw=80

And to reformat my posts, I went over my text lines (I avoided breaking code sample lines), and used gq to reformat each section.

The source code for my blog is available on my git server, you can find the source for the raw plugin as well as the layout file.