2025-11-03 Gemini and Gopher support for this site
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This blog is also accessible via Gemini and Gopher.

I recently did some tinkering with my Patched Satellite and my
Markdown Gopher to get things working for my 2025 Portugal post.

The main problem was that if I link to the directory (2025-portugal)
then the web redirects to the index file (index).

Patched Satellite didn't do this. It tried to read the index.gmi file
that wasn't there. The first fix was to read the index.md fix if
possible. But that still didn't work because all the images didn't
load. This has to do with relative URLs. If the page
2025-portugal/index links to a local file, say image.jpg, then the
result is 2025-portugal/image.jpg. But if 2025-portugal just reads
the index file in the background, then the result of the link is
image.jpg! The browser computes the link target based on its current
URL and reading a file from a subdirectory without telling the browser
breaks all these links. So I needed either some processing for all
links, or a redirect from 2025-portugal to 2025-portugal/index. And
that's what I did.

For Markdown Gopher the problem was worse: By default, when visiting a
directory, it takes the index file and tries to show a menu with all
the "linked list items". This works well if the file called "index"
actually is an index to other pages. But in the 2025 Portugal case,
the index page is just a page with regular links. The menu was
effectively empty, resulting in an empty response. I was very
confused. What I'm doing now is I count the number of "linked list
items". If that number is 0, I create return a single menu line saying
"please follow this redirect" (manually!) to the same index file, but
now using item type 0 (text) instead of item type 1 (menu).

There probably a way to fix this by moving the decision "up" to the
menu above. When displaying the main page, I could check every local
link target and if it points to a directory, check the index file, and
if it doesn't have "linked list items" create a text item, otherwise a
menu item. That seems like a lot of compute for a relatively rare
situation. So for the moment, "manual redirects" it is.

#Gemini #Gopher