💾 Archived View for gem.billsmugs.com › gemlog › 2022-01-17-re-antennazine.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 12:48:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Re: AntennaZINE

I saw the following post on Antenna where someone is confused (and somewhat dismissive) of the AntennaZINE project and it re-awakened my guilty conscience about not opting in to it:

gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2022-01-17.azine.gmi

An explanation of what AntennaZINE is

To me, the purpose of the project seems relatively obvious - there aren't many (any?) commercial e-reader devices that have even basic Gemini support, but lots of people might want to read Gemini content on electronic paper displays, so this provides a weekly round-up of gemlog posts ready-packaged in a suitable format.

The file formats provided are the two most commonly supported e-book formats available - the only other widely supported options would be PDF (which provides a much inferior experience to dedicated e-book formats, at least in my experience on an Amazon Kindle) or plain text (which loses the formatting of gemtext headers, preformatted blocks, etc). The fact that none of the links in the included posts are likely to work on an e-reader definitely reduces the utility, but most e-readers provide the ability to highlight text and view those highlights on another device, so you could easily mark interesting links to view later when you're on your PC or phone - this would work better if the full URL were visible in the text, rather than just the title.

I have occasionally copied longer posts from Gemini capsules into documents and converted them manually into e-books to read on my e-reader and I might use the AntennaZINE code in future to automatically produce better quality versions for my own personal use (the output is definitely a lot better than my own quick and dirty "copy and paste into Libreoffice then convert via Calibre" workflow!)

I have to admit, my initial surprise at the linked post's confusion was reduced somewhat when I went to the latest AntennaZINE post and saw that, while the explanation for the project is linked from there, the link for some reason points to an http version of the page. This seems like a very odd choice, especially when the entire project is based around Gemini and the content is available on the author's own Gemini capsule!

I haven't personally opted in to including my gemlog posts in the project for a few reasons, none of which are necessarily set in stone. The first is that I don't know what (if any) license I want to apply to my posts. The second is a worry (exacerbated now I've noticed the apparent web-focus of the capsule with the http links) that contributing to AntennaZINE will result in people missing out on exploring the full content of Geminispace, by limiting themselves to a small number of gemlogs that are accessible without needing a Gemini client or proxy. The final reason is an admittedly selfish (and perhaps "un-Gemini") one - I like seeing the page views on my capsule and so would rather people came to the original source, instead of exclusively reading via a pre-compiled epub file.