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The Gemini protocol nicely matches my preference for simplicity, so I want to start providing content for it to show my support. The first step for doing that is providing this blog via Gemini. I'll quickly summarize the steps that were necessary to do this in this post.
Gemini[1] is an extremely simplified version of the web. It doesn't have Javascript, CSS (or any other kind of styling) and it's markup language Gemtext is much simpler than Markdown. It doesn't use HTTP, but works in a similar way. Don't be irritated by the lack of content about Gemini on the web. You'll see most of the content about it only after installing a Gemini client. My recommendation is LaGrange[2]. The great thing about Gemini is that both creating and consuming content is pretty easy due to the low complexity in every regard.
1: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
2: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
I don't want to write each block post twice, so I'd like to convert the existing posts (written in Markdown) to Gemtext automatically. Fortunately, there's md2gemini[3], which can handle the conversion process. Since Gemtext does not support inline links, the links in my posts have to be moved out of the paragraphs into separate lines. md2gemini offers multiple ways to that. Putting the links at the end of each paragraph and numbering the references inside the paragraph (like this `[1]`) seemed like the most readable way to me, so I chose that one.
3: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/md2gemini
The resulting Gemini pages worked, but had two problems left:
Both of these issues arise because md2gemini does not try to interpret HTML (which is allowed in Markdown documents). The easy fix was to replace the HTML markup before passing it to md2gemini with regular expressions:
s/<a href="([^"]*)".*>(.*)<\/a>/[\2](\1)/g s/^<!--.*-->//gsm
Combined with the call to md2gemini, this led to the following shell function to process Markdown to Gemtext.
GEMINI() {
<"$1" perl -0pe 's/<a href="([^"]*)".*>(.*)<\/a>/[\2](\1)/g;s/^<!--.*-->//gsm' | md2gemini --links paragraph;
}
Now I can use this inside my page generation loop, I just have to replace the target suffix and append the last modification date.
GEMINI "$filename" | \
sed "$ s/$/\\n\\n$dates_text/" \
> "$(echo "$target" | sed s/.html/.gmi/)"
With the posts working, I'm still missing a proper index page. It should consist of an introductory text and a list of blog posts, ideally prefixed by the ISO date of the post, so that it matches the optional Gemini feed format[4]. Instead of doing any abstractions, I just copied the index generation code for the HTML version and adapted it to Gemtext.
4: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/companion/subscription.gmi
index_gmi() {
# Intro text
GEMINI index.md
# Posts
while read -r f title created updated; do
if [ "$created" = "draft" ] && [ "$2" = "hide-drafts" ]; then continue; fi
link=$(echo "$f" | sed -E 's|.*/(.*).md|\1.gmi|')
created=$(echo "$created" | sed -E 's/T.*//')
echo "=> $link $created - $title"
done < "$1"
}
That's all that was necessary to create Gemtext pages for my blog. Right now, there are only two things I plan to improve in the future:
Since Gemini doesn't use HTTP, I can't just copy the generated pages to my normal webspace. Fortunately, setting up a Gemini server is pretty easy.
There are plenty of Gemini servers. I chose gmnisrv[6] for the following reasons:
6: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmnisrv
The compilation and installation was dead simple and done in a minute, just by following the instructions in gmnisrv's readme. Writing the configuration was also straightforward and resulted in this small config.
listen=0.0.0.0:1965 [::]:1965 [:tls] store=/var/lib/gemini/certs [gmi.karl.berlin] root=/home/karl/hosts/karl.berlin/
The Gemini server itself worked now, but it was not reachable from the outside, yet. The two missing steps were
As a final touch, I added a systemd unit to automatically start gmnisrv.
[Unit] Description=gmnisrv Gemini server (see /usr/local/etc/gmnisrv.ini for config) [Service] Type=simple Restart=always RestartSec=5 ExecStart=gmnisrv [Install] WantedBy=default.target
Please note that you want to use a non-root user if there are other important services on the machine.
That's it! If you are still reading this in your web browser, fire up your Gemini client and look at the result[7]! Considering that this was a low effort way to create a presence in Gemini space, I'm quite pleased with the results.
My next goal regarding Gemini will be to bring WikDict[8] to Gemini, which should be a bit more challenging.
Written on 2021-01-31.