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Continuing the experiment.
23 May, 2025
My first post in this series was manually crafted, but coding a static almost-a-site generator, without having to worry about all the interrelationships on the old site was quick, & in Rust terms at least, relatively easy. This is now sent out using a much scaled back alternative to Zine.
After slavishly following different web standards for these last thirty years -- thirty! -- there was something that felt almost transgressive in re-using the same title for more than one post. Is that allowed? Am I being... wrong? I did that to not have to include any front-matter in a post. The date is just the date, all that I have to enter is the body in Markdown. Maybe I'll walk that back, cadge the title from the first line or something, but it's interesting to see how little I can make this thing.
In another part of this en-little-ing experiment, these posts are going out simultaneously over HTTP & the Gemini Protocol. The Gemtext created by manually editing the Markdown for the moment. Same domain, but gemini:// instead of https://. I'm in two minds about whether a cut-down version of HTML or an alternative standard like Gemini is the way to go, but for now I'm playing with both. I won't provide any links, you can find out about it in the usual ways. Links are definitely part of the bot problem.
For Gemini I'm using Lagrange as a browser on the desktop, & have used Buran on Android. I don't know of an iOS browser. A lot of Gemini apps flowered & withered two or three years ago, so, an opportunity for someone I guess. The site, ahem, capsule, goes out via an Agate server but there are a few things I'd like to change about that. I wrote a Gemini server in Ruby called Above a while ago, maybe I'll resurrect that, or something like it. It would be interesting to play around with DANE, user agents & robots.txt files, feeds, a bunch of things I think Gemini gets wrong. Or at least does in ways different to my precise liking. A little protocol like Gemini means I can write a server, & also a browser, & still live my life. That's never been true for the current web.