💾 Archived View for gemini.jayeless.net › gemlog › 2021-01-13-hello.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 16:28:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Hello, Gemini space (again)!

My name's Jessica, and I'm still a real newbie to the world of Gemini. It seems like a fantastic idea though, so I wanted to dive in with a Gemini capsule of my own. What you see here is the first gemlog post on that capsule 🙂

I've had an interest in the "small web" and adjacent concepts for a while, so there are a number of things about Gemini that really appeal to me. Some of these are:

The restricted formatting available makes malfeasance almost impossible, in contrast to all the tracking scripts, Bitcoin mining scripts, etc. that tarnish the web.
The restricted formatting *also* makes it an ideal experience for text-centric content: styling is in the hands of the reader (through their client), not the content creator, so the viewing experience can be exactly what's most comfortable to you.
File sizes are extremely low, ensuring fast load times, and also making the internet more accessible to people on slow or limited connections.
The vibe of Gemini space appeals to me: it's all about non-commercial hobby sites, which I love!
I think it's neat, technically, that you can have *client-side* TLS certificates to identify yourself uniquely *to Gemini capsules*. It's so much neater an alternative than creating user accounts on every damn website. I'm not sure if or when I'll ever actually make use of this capability, but it's just so smart an idea.

I feel like I'm a lot less technical than most of the people already using Gemini. While installing and using a client is easy (I've gone with Lagrange), hosting my own server proved to be beyond me (mainly because the web host I use to host my HTTPS website blocks requests on all other protocols). Thankfully, there are a couple of options now available that even completely non-technical people can use with ease:

Gemlog.blue is where I started running a Gemlog, for a few days. It's very simplistic (the web interface doesn't even need to install cookies!) but adequate if all you want to do is have a gemlog.

Flounder.online is where I've now ended up. It's more flexible, while still having in-built features to make running a Gemlog a little easier than doing it completely manually.

The other thing that really appealed to me about Flounder is that (as of literally about three days ago), it supports the use of custom domains. This means that if the service ever needs to close, or a different host crops up that I think would serve my needs better, I can move my stuff across and just point my subdomain to the new host, resulting in minimal disruption and no broken links 🙂 To my mind this is a hugely important feature, and I'm so glad Flounder offers it.

My content on this Gemini capsule will probably be very similar to what I have (or will have) on my HTTPS website. It won't be exactly the same, because I want to make sure the content I post here is optimised for the Gemini format, but I would expect a lot of overlap. Flounder does offer an automatic HTTPS version of any Gemini capsule hosted here, and while that might be a good choice for you if you're on a very limited connection, in general I'd recommend going straight to my website if you want HTTPS-protocol content:

https://www.jayeless.net

Now that all of that is said and done, thank you for visiting, and I hope you enjoy your time on my capsule!