A serial in literature is a format of making larger works published in short, more easily digestable installments. I assume that people experiment all the time with this online but I have never really gotten into it. However, I like the idea of serializing works for reading basically any genre¹ (fiction, academic texts, etc). I recently stumbled across a site that promises to send emails with sections of books at regular intervals². This is a great idea but I have a need to serialize basically any book in my digital library. So, I set out to develop a tool for my own use ³, whereby I could send myself sections of any of my digital books at regular intervals that better suit my reading schedule. To that end, I am developing hmsecho.
hmsecho is a go-lang program that can⁴ send sections of txt or pdf documents to an email address, recording where it left off and when it is at the end. What is required is that I add little annotations where I want sections in the txt ⁵ or split up pdfs and store the sections in a folder ⁶. Then, at least presently, I use cron to schedule the sending of the messages ⁷.
We will see if this revolutionizes anything for me⁸. But, either way, I learned how to use the smtp standard library in go-lang, as well as the powerful email package by jordan wright. Currently reading exhalation by Ted Chiang. We will see how far I get…