2023-03-08
Over the past few months I've been getting increasingly reliant on a small corner of Gemini: the utilities by Acidus available at gemi.dev
Some of them are built around the idea of proxying http content to Gemini. For example, Wikipedia via Gemini:
Or reading one of hundreds (thousands?) of Newspapers, Magazines and the like via Gemini, with Newswaffle. It's not simply a dump of the html text content, but instead makes a best guess at readability, eliminating navigation, sidebars, headers, footers and other cruft. And reduces the page size and load, sometimes by 95%.
They also operate Chilly Weather, a great Gemini-native weather 'app'.
And they've developed Kennedy, a new Gemini search engine; a Minesweeper clone and a geography game, as well as have a useful gem-log and some hosting services of various other blogs and comics.
Through the process of making NewsWaffle they developed Stargate, which is a full HTTP-to-Gemini proxy, so you can access http sites via your Gemini client.
What these tools mean for me is that I now can have the relaxing text-driven experience of my dreams, in the client of my choice, with the minimal design (or at least colors!) of my choosing. This almost luddite use of the web is how I envisioned it could be for years. It's not simply a re-invention of Lynx, w3m, links2....but really a whole cleaned up minimal 'smol' version of the wider web.
I'm currently in the process of building my own toy web browser with Love2d and http/s requests and I'm finding reading their article on converting http-to-md and gmi to be quite helpful.
Acidus has a short post about how Gemini is a fertile space for hacking. I hope to do some of my own experiments too.
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