💾 Archived View for altesq.net › ~evenfire › posts › capsule-design.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:46:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Recently, I have re-designed my capsule, inspired by a post from idiomdrottning[1] about designing your capsule for simplicity.
I switched from using the ISO8601 format dates in the URL, to including the full post title, no date. The date could induce FOMO as in "oh, what other posts are there this is from N date", while I do not want it to be that. Besides, the principle of presenting every resource as a first-class citizen is a good idea, not piggy-backing off your posts in order to redirect people to your capsule. The content matters, not views.
Although, the URLs might get a tad too long if there is a lengthy title, I will see how I shorten it, perhaps not including linker words.
Presenting all your posts in their best way, without publicizing your capsule, gives a more focused and intimate feel, quite like reading a letter. Just the titles and text, no distractions even in the URL. It forces the reader to make a conscious choice over checking out your capsule, by typing the full URL, not mindlessly browsing the Gemini space.
I do have all my posts in a posts directory, as I personally dislike the way of all your posts being in the root directory. Feels messy even if it makes the URL cleaner. Better management of the capsule is worth it over searching for posts with grep.
I have also added my own touch in the case of formatting, such as all titles should have spaces before hand, such as "# Title" not "#Title", and a blank line after it. It makes it more readable, giving it a more polished look. Titles should also use sentence case meaning "This is a lengthy title", not "This is a Lengthy Title" or variations of it, unless it is a name. Wikipedia's manual of style[2] has been useful in making my posts more readable and the overall formatting better.
Aside from that, for easy accessibility, all links should be at the bottom of the page for easy access, numbered correctly, meaning if the first link is 1 you can press 1 on your keyboard (depending on your client here) and get taken there. I have seen multiple capsules where the links are numbered but the first link is like 3 and such because of them linking back to their index page.
Gemini clients auto formats text so there is not much there, I insert a new line after every paragraph or every idea I have in order to spread the text out in blocks of text which make it much more readable and wraps nicely.
Overall, I think the changes so far have helped readability and refined the capsule experience.