💾 Archived View for mozz.us › journal › 2020-06-03.gmi captured on 2021-12-17 at 13:26:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Published 2020-06-03
A while ago I posted an idea on the gemini mailing list about a rudimentary implementation of favicons using unicode characters.
Since then I have still been pondering this idea, so I decided to flesh it out a bit more. To that end, I've started working on a very informal RFC to outline what the behavior might look like. I'm not proposing that this should be added to the core gemini specification. Heck, I'm not even proposing that it should necessarily be accepted at all. But I think it has some charm and I'm glad that at least I went through with the process of writing it up.
RFC: Adding Emoji Favicons to Gemini
I've already added favicon support to my gemini->https proxy as outlined in the above document. This was the best I could do because I don't author an actual gemini client to fiddle around with. It wasn't too difficult to add, about 50 lines of python in total. I'm using the list of valid emoji sequences from this package:
https://github.com/carpedm20/emoji/blob/master/emoji/unicode_codes.py
So heads up for those of you who watch your sever logs, if you see requests for "/favicon.txt" they're probably from me. I implemented caching so that my proxy *shouldn't* request the resource more than once per hour. But there are always bugs, so let me know if you see any weird behavior. If you are morally opposed and outraged by this, I guess let me know and we can work something out. Or you can simply block my proxy's IP address. I have seen a few servers do this already, and I'm 100% on board with it. It's ultimately your server and your choice.
1. Create a file named "favicon.txt" in the root of your server, containing a single emoji character [1].
2. Wait up to an hour for https://portal.mozz.us to pick up your change.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html Official list of valid emojis
It's a fish.