About half a year ago I came across a blog post [1] about the Gemini protocol at Hacker News [2]. At the time, I was toying with the idea of programming my own web server for fun. Beyond that, I developed a fondness for spartan websites. When you regularly take the train to work, you learn to appreciate web pages that load quickly. Also, I find it annoying when you can't read web pages at all when Javascript is disabled. With No-Script [3], this is the default case for me.
Gemini thus aroused my curiosity. After a short time I had programmed a first minimal Gemini client with graphical user interface in Java. I have since developed the client a bit further. I like the fact that the protocol and the language for writing Gemini pages are kept so simple that it is relatively easy to write your own client. However, I have to admit that at the moment I don't use my own client that much anymore and instead use Elpher [4], which is because I like using Emacs. :-)
The next step was then the own Gemini server. I wrote this in Java as well. Of course it is still expandable. But it runs. That is already something. :-) At least I was able to provide this post via my own server. And the implementation currently gets along without dependencies (apart from Maven and JUnit), which keeps the maintenance effort low.
I'll leave the client as it is for now. Since I don't use it myself at the moment, further development doesn't have such a high priority. I would like to extend the Gemini server with the "lang" parameter next. I plan to migrate my german weblog to Gemini.
And maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to fill my Gemini server with some content. ;-)
[1] https://toffelblog.xyz/blog/gemini-overview/