💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~dhruva › 2022-05-12_181238.gmi captured on 2023-04-20 at 00:34:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
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I revamped my blog again instead of actually writing posts. Oh well.
I wanted a minimalistically cool blog like
and
websites.
My previous blog setup was made using
, and building it implied setting up an entire julia installation. And even after all that, the blog looked pretty boring. I still struggled to set up tags and I had to constantly fight the default css or write everything myself. Also, when I built that blog, I was learning JS, and I used a lot of unnecessary js and styling. Finally, Franklin’s complex build meant that
was so much more harder to make.
I still wanted to write in markdown and make it to html. The best converter I know is pandoc. It has a very good template support, and having used it before, I was comfortable with it. I had already made a
for jekyll for my
, and modifying it to match pandoc’s template was easy.
The best part of pandoc is that it is so easily extendable. There is a gemtext filter for pandoc which meant that with just one more command I could also build my gemini capsule. I had to tweak the filter a bit to add .gmi to links where necessary, which was technically a simple change, but I don’t know lua, so I flailed around a bit before I got it. Templating for gemini was even easier since there isn’t much you can do in the first place.
I initially thought I would make the blog like a digital garden, but then decided against since I knew I wouldn’t write too much to actually populate the garden enough. And setting up such a thing I felt was way too complicated for a low traffic blog like mine.
So I ended making a Table of Contents. Previously, I just had the entry as the filename, but that was very difficult to follow. With a little of sed-fu, I extracted the title from the front matter. With a tiny change, I made it work for gemini too.
At this point, I was going to release the new blog, but then I had a new itch
I wanted to also have an RSS feed. I already use RSS extensively for comics,
and other blogs, and wanted people to see mine too. I searched online a bit for an RSS maker script, but I only found subscription stuff. I was almost going to write my own script, when I came across a post on fosstodon which talked about an RSS-only blog. They used txt files to manage their content, but converting markdown to html was already possible with pandoc, so with some heavy modifications, I built the RSS feed with a script
At this point, I was ALMOST going to publish it. I had made everything I wanted to. Just a few more CSS fixes, and we were good to go. But as I was setting up markdown support for lunarvim, I came across
. And this blew my mind. Without me doing anything, it gave me everything I needed. Contents were just one command away, and for almost free, I got tag support.
Within a day, I set up zk, added tags to my previous articles, added a new template for the tags page, and fixed some other templates. I also added a cute neon effect to the tag list at the end of every page. I found a small mistake in the gemini script, which I fixed.
Now, my blog is perfect.
Except…
I really want to add my blog to both of these. For 512KB, I don’t know whether it is per page or per site. Right now, my site sits at 131KB for the whole thing, but that is with 8 posts. Every post I add, I add about 1KB. I don’t know how people are getting their sites to less than 100KB. That seems impossible.
As for fediring, it is just a matter of doing it, which I haven’t done.