Publishing on a Pubnix

Publishing on a Pubnix

How tildes serve user content. The model is the same across town, pink, club, green, envs, and sdf.

The Directories

Dir in `~`	Served at	Protocol
`public_html/`	`host.tld/~you/`	http
`public_gopher/`	`host.tld` port 70	gopher
`public_gemini/`	`gemini://host.tld/~you/`	gemini

Anything dropped in is live immediately. No deploy step, no build queue: the server is just a web server reading your home directory.

Permissions

The thing everyone forgets:

chmod 755 ~                           # home must be traversable
chmod 755 ~/public_html               # dirs: 755
chmod 644 ~/public_html/index.html    # files: 644
chmod 664 file                        # communal file: group-write
chmod 775 dir                         # communal dir

The symptom of getting this wrong is a 403 Forbidden on a file that definitely exists. It is always permissions.

The Workflow

Edit locally, push with rsync:

rsync -avhP --delete ~/site/ host:public_html/
rsync -avhP ~/site/ you@tilde.town:public_html/

–delete mirrors exactly. Preview with -n (dry run) first.
sshfs works too (sshfs host:public_html ~/mnt), but rsync does not depend on connection quality.
On the host, everything is editable live: ssh in, edit ~/public_html/index.html in nano or vim, done.

Town-Specific Conventions

ttbp (“feels”): the town diary tool. One plaintext entry per day, renders to ~/public_html/feels/ and gopher. See tilde.town Tools.
town planet: the blog aggregator. List your feed URL in ~/.planetfeeds to join it. See RSS by Hand for making a feed.
town square: /town/square/public_html maps to tilde.town/square. Shared and world-writable. See Town Square.
guestbook.txt: convention for leaving notes. Link it from your index so visitors know it exists.

What Feels Native

Hand-written or lightly generated HTML. Heavy JS sites feel alien on a pubnix.
Link to your other tildes. Webring and badge culture is still active: 88×31 buttons are the convention.
robots.txt and a favicon are cheap politeness.
A .plan file (what finger you@host shows) is the old-school status line. See .plan and .project.

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