2020-12-19

serve gemini site as html, too?

#flightlog

Prolog

Should I make my gemini capsule available via http as well?

If yes: Do I give in to the corporate web by providing content for it? Is this a "good thing(tm)"?

If no: Do I give those souls, who have not yet seen the smolnet, a fair chance to see it? Is this a "good thing(tm)"?

To be honest, I would not be able to do my day job without the big corporate web and all the pieces of information that others present. So hiding my own little bits in this newfangled smolweb wouldn't be entirely fair, would it?

Turning to technical details. How do I want the html-pages to be created? Certainly not by hand.

There are at least three solutions:

Converting .gmi markup to simple .html

Two hours of fiddling produced two shell scripts which will copy the file tree of my capsule into a second tree with a very simple html markup. I have not attempted to be complete, just good enough for my capsule. Please note that I serve this capsule behind an onion service, so there is one extra rewrite for links pointing back to it.

gem2html.sh

gem2html.sh (raw)

In order to integrate this step into the Makefile, I wrote a wrapper script to call the converter on all .gmi files.

html-publish.sh

html-publish.sh (raw)

I'm not convinced that this is a good solution,

Happy hacking!

[a] Phoebe is provided by Alex Schroeder

gemini://alexschroeder.ch:1965/do/source

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