💾 Archived View for gem.girlmeow.autos › log › log › 2022-12-06%20Hello%20world.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:46:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Hi gemspace, this is my first log post, kind of as a test. It will remain to be seen how often I update this, but I think everything should work fine, and I've created a second log for when I want to write one in toki pona. Hopefully it motivates me to practice?
I've been eyeballing Gemini for a while now and originally wanted to host my own server on a raspberry pi, but it hasn't panned out that way yet because I'm dirt poor... but in a fit of maybe mania (maybnia?) I committed myself to a KVM VPS for like $8/mo maybe a month ago. I got it so I could run my own Pleroma instance and, incidentally, my own personal site. It's definitely been a learning curve since I'm ~passively techy~ but have never done any kind of server admin before. But everything's been running pretty smoothly for a while now, and I've been spending my spare time (re: unemployment; all of the time) working away at learning PHP and stuff so that I can use my personal site to host all my own art with minimal effort and in a user-friendly way.
I've got it set up so that everything can be sorted alphabetically or chronologically or whatever, filtered by tags, and every image has a description and alt text and such. Most of this isn't TOO complicated under the hood -- PHP reads a bunch of XML files that correspond to each image, and loads the junk into Javascript to do as it pleases -- but a lot of the work went into developing tools on my side of things that streamline the process of building XML files, so I don't have to painstakingly write them out and upload them onto my server every time I draw art (if I had to do that I'd never do it)
But the more you work on the project, the more the beast grows. All for the better, though; as I started building these (very janky) tools to streamline this process, I had all these XML files sitting around on my laptop too. So I figured I would make a tool that automatically sorts my art for me too, by building a directory structure based on tags as I specify them, and populating it with symlinks. It's a lot niftier than dumping every png in a folder labelled "drawings," and you can see it in action too! Making this capsule, it seemed like the best way to get my art up on here way to just port that tool over so it replicated the exact same structure in the root folder of this capsule.
Then I also made sure the tool can archive my website and art while I'm at it, so I have some redundancy storing everything on my laptop and on my server, plus I'll put it on some external storage eventually too. I figured this was necessary after I scared myself putting my laptop out of commission for a few days by deleting the boot sector (I thought I clicked a sector on a USB drive... ~passively techy~ is a dangerous thing LOL)
But anyway, that all brings me to here. I've got all this server stuff going on so I figured it's time to get around to sticking a Gemini site up on here. This server brought to you by molly-brown (thank you solderpunk!)
I've got some plans floating around in my head for what comes next now, but I'm thinking of trying my hand first of all at building a browser. I also want to put all my poetry up on here, which I've started doing, but I'm taking my time with because I want to accompany each one with some ASCII art, which I'm learning to make.
Anyway, that's enough logged for today...
★Star