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Gemini analytics

Created 2022-06-01

I'm new to Gemini. I made a post to Antenna, the blog aggregator. I was interested to see how many hits it generated over 24 hours. After some data munging, I came up with this:

    117 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/2022-05-30-trying-freebsd.gmi"
     38 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/2022-05-27-systemd-bullshit.gmi"
     32 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/2022-05-27-capsule-launch.gmi"
     14 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/"
     10 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/blog.gmi"
      8 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/about.gmi"
      6 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/gemini.gmi"
      6 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/2021-me.jpg"
      4 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/gopher.gmi"
      4 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/chirps.gmi"
      4 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com:1965/"
      3 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/vscode.gmi"
      3 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/systemd.gmi"
      3 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/audio.gmi"
      2 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/vim.gmi"
      2 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/unicode.gmi"
      2 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/test.txt"
      2 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com/platformio.gmi"
      2 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com:1965/about.gmi"
      2 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com:1965/2022-05-30-trying-freebsd.gmi"
      1 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com:1965/unicode.gmi"
      1 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com:1965/blog.gmi"
      1 "gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com"

Surprisingly popular!

The top 5 pages account for 211 hits. Let's call it 200. All the calculations are somewhat "back of the envelope". I'm just trying to gauge rough numbers rather than precise ones.

I am encouraged by the seeming popularity of Gemini. People are reading your stuff. So it seems a worthwhile platform.

More for my benefit than anyone else's, the script that generated it was:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
grep 0.13 agate1.log | grep INFO | awk -e '{print $11}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tac

Antenna

Some thoughts on Gopher, Gemini and Spartan

I've been mucking about with setting up servers in Gemini, Spartan, and even Gopher.

Gopher was probably the easiest to set up, as there is mature software available for every distro. The problem with Gopher is that writing content is a bit of a chore. I don't really like the distinction between a gophermap and regular text. Seems a little arbitrary. I have been working on a Gopher bridge, which seemlessly serves gmi pages over Gopher. It's not finished yet, but the task is not to onerous. I'm at under 200 lines of Perl code.

Gemini. I'm not fond of the whole TLS stuff. I think it adds a lot of complexity for little if any gain (and probable loss). I'm no network or security guy, so trying to figure out all this extra security stuff is an exercise in frustration.

Perhaps a better way of arranging it is to have unsecure content on one port, and secure on another. Make unsecure the default. So something like regular Gemini on port 1965, and TLS on port 1966. My guess is that people won't bother to implement the secure stuff. I'm not proposing to rehash the arguments for and against TLS in this post.

Spartan. So if you drop the securiyy stuff out of Gemini, you basically end up with Spartan. So Spartan kinda wins, really. The downside to it is that it is not as popular as Gemini, and doesn't have as much client support. I do wish the default socket was above 1024, though.

So, that's my ramblings for the day, Time to go out and get some exercise.