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2020-07-05 - A Geminispace

I tried to resurrect my blog at the end of 2019, joined the #100DaysToOffload posting challenge for a little bit, and then fell off the wagon at the end of May. For a while it was nice to just write regularly, but I ran out of ideas, and motivation. June was a month of feeling that with all the stuff going on in the USA and the world, writing about some nerdy things wasn't really important, nor much of an escape.

A month later now, I've come across Gemini and will try and start posting things again in the Geminispace. I've been enjoying being immersed in the text-based world of SDF and the tildeverse lately, so keeping content on Gemini appeals. I didn't ever get tempted to create stuff on gopher, as it all seemed a bit a bit overly obscure with outdated types, gophermaps etc. Gemini feels comfortable to write in - with a minimal markdown inspired syntax.

I'm thinking that I'll make this the primary place I will write anything public, keep notes that might be useful to others, etc. I'll mirror from gemini content to my website, rather than the other way around. I'm also looking forward to writing some CGI stuff and so on. More ways to tinker with computers that are rather different than the complex containers, modern web, cloud space I work in :-)

Hosting this site

To setup a Geminispace I had a root around pages for the different servers, and decided to start of using jetforce as I know Python and it seems to be mentioned quite a bit.

https://github.com/michael-lazar/jetforce

I have a NetBSD 9.0 VPS that I use to host web / DNS / mail for this domain, so I have setup jetforce to serve two vhosts:

randomroad.net as a top-level Geminispace for the domain

dctrud.randomroad.net for my stuff

It all seems to work very nicely so far!

Reading things

I'm an Emacs user, and have used org-mode for a while to publish web things, so Elpher was an obvious client. I also grabbed and compiled Castor to see how that looked with a GTK GUI.

gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/projects/elpher

https://git.sr.ht/~julienxx/castor

Converting content

To get my org-mode blog posts into gemini format I just did a quick trip through .org -> .md -> .gmi with pandoc and md2gemini. I could have used org-md-export-to-markdown but I have some pandoc shell one-liners from previous conversions that needed to run without emacs.

https://pandoc.org/

https://pypi.org/project/md2gemini/