Episode: 4208
Title: HPR4208: 01 Plain Text Programs
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4208/hpr4208.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:23:22

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4200 and 8 for Wednesday the 18th of September 2024.
Today's show is entitled One Plane Text Programs.
It is part of the series programming 101.
It is the first show by new host Harry Larry and is about six minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, playing text programs, what they are, what they do, why they're good,
and why they're not for everything.
Welcome to the Plane Text Programs podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host Harry Larry and my motto is K-I-S-S, stupid.
Episode 1, Plane Text Programs.
Hi, I'm here to talk about Plane Text Programs, what they are, what they do, why they're good,
and why they're not for everything.
Right up front, I'm requesting feedback on what I have to say.
I'm on Macedon and I'll start a thread for each podcast,
or you can reach me by email.
My Macedon address is at Harry Larry at gamerplus.org.
My profile is gamerplus.org forward slash at Harry Larry.
And my email is HarryLarry at deltabookie.com.
I want to mention that my name Harry Larry, my stage name, is spelled H-A-I-R-Y-L-A-R-Y.
Take a look at one of my pictures to figure this out.
Also, you can network with Harry Larry at deltabookie.net.
In the future, I plan on doing podcasts on specific Plane Text Programs,
some that I wrote, and some that were written by others.
Any program that I will discuss will be licensed with a free culture license.
The first thing I want to emphasize about Plane Text Programs is that there's no database
like SQL or LLM. All text data is written in Plane Text files and stored on a file system.
Now, I love databases. Before I retired, I was a database programmer.
And as a database programmer, I learned a lot about the difficulties
of maintaining programs that rely on databases. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with a
database that's just not reasonable to try with Plane Text. Now that I'm retired, I don't really
want to work that hard anymore. I want programming to be easy and fun. Plane Text does not mean there
can't be images or other media. Image files like .jpeg or .png can be stored in the file system
just like text files. No worries. A big advantage of Plane Text Programs is portability.
To back up a working program, you copy the directory tree that holds the program's files.
To install or restore a Plane Text program, copy the tree onto a system or a server.
I usually work on Linux using the PHP programming language. This is, of course, my preference.
Any language running on any file system can be used to write Plane Text Programs.
My minimum install will usually have a configuration file, at least one program file,
and a set of text files. Some of the Plane Text Programs I use all the time that I wrote are,
for websites, dirt simple photo gallery, Plane Text Blog, not actually Plane Text Blog,
and network with Harry Larry. I also have two internet radio programs,
mixed remix, Creative Commons Jazz, and KGPL. And I have a utility I use called Backup the Web
Server. I also use Plane Text Programs that other programmers wrote. Music folder player,
free PHP file directory script, and simple image browser. Links to these programs are in the script.
So these are mostly websites or web applications, but Plane Text Programs do not have to be outward
facing. They can just be an easy program that you write to automate a task that you have to
do periodically, like my Backup the Web Server program that I wrote in bash. I write my Plane Text
Programs websites so that updates and additions are made with FTP. FTP is a well-established
secure way to transfer files from your development system to your web server. Another good option,
particularly for static websites that are generated on the development system, and then mirrored
up to the server is our sync. I believe that simplicity is the key. I have written complicated
Plane Text Programs, including the social network writing game collab, but I think a simple page
or few pages design fits the Plane Text paradigm better. Well, I'm going to call this a wrap for
now. I plan on covering specific Plane Text Programs in future podcasts, and I may occasionally
step back and look at the big picture or discuss ideas and specifications for future projects.
Thanks for listening. I appreciate all your comments. You can find the Plane Text script
with the link to the comment thread and all other links at home.gamerplus.org. I'm not actually
Plane Text blog.
You have been listening to the Plane Text Programs podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
Go to home.gamerplus.org for scripts and links, and go to deltabookie.net to network with
Harry Larry. Thanks for listening.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HBR has
been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our sync.net. On the
Sadois status, today's show is released on their creative comments, attribution, 4.0 international
