💾 Archived View for lupine.agency › gemlog › 2023-04-13.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:44:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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April 13, 2023
[checks notes] According to my domain registrar, I bought this domain on February 4, 2023. I don't remember why, exactly, maybe I just wanted a new wolf-related domain to use as my homepage, despite already having one. (I may have a problem with buying domains.)
With that aside, when I bought this domain, I quickly got around setting it up, in a fashion not too dissimilar to what you see right now. My original reasoning behind setting it up like that (which still holds up today) was that I wanted it to be text-oriented, and Gemini is lightweight enough that it works just well enough to plain text authoring.
Then, during March, I decided I wanted to write a new "iteration" of my website, this time as a homegrown server in Go, titled "saguaro", which also used Gemtext for content authoring. This was the beginning of the lupine agency as a blog. The first post was about the server itself, the reasoning behind it, etc. I thought that by writing it myself, I would feel content with it once complete.
That was only partly true. By writing it myself, I did feel happy about it, but I also wanted to add more and more and more and more and more and mo- (ok, that's enough.) I ended up:
Did I need that? No, not really. I ended up realizing that I wrote those things just because I could, and because other people I admire also had their websites be more of a wiki.
I wondered what to do for a couple days. Do I really want a website? Maybe, I like feeling like I have a place on the internet. Do I really want a blog? Hell no, I barely write things to put as "blog posts". Do I want a "personal wiki"? Not really, I don't think so.
Then, while browsing GitHub (more specifically, cblgh's cerca[a]), I remembered sensorstation.co's Lichen[b], a CMS for gemtext written in Forth (fancy!)
[a] cblgh/cerca: lean forum software
If you wonder how did I get from forum software to a CMS; winduptoy at Sensor Station also made a forum software, for which they cite cerca as an inspiration for the UI.
A friend had mentioned it a while ago in the Factor language Discord server, but I largely had forgotten about it until now. (turns out that the person who wrote it also has an account on merveilles.town, cool!)
I didn't want to use it though, because it uses GFORTH, and I had tried to get it running nicely inside a chroot (without copying the entire world inside), to not much avail, so I thought, why not just write my own CMS-like thing inspired by it?
Its name was going to be "limestone", for no reason. I had already written a Gemtext parser and a (still work in progress) Gemini server, so I thought it would be a good idea. Sadly, I was wrong. I got tired and never finished it.
That was when I realized:
Why do I keep trying to reinvent the wheel?
I still don't know but I am actively trying to avoid it.
Now, this website is back to where we started, even from a technical viewpoint. Running on my OpenBSD server, using Omar Polo's gmid[a] as a Gemini server, and Galileo[b] for proxying to HTTP. I am writing the pages and the indices (indexes?) by hand, since they're just plain text anyways, I don't need to bother with generation at this point.
[b] Galileo, Gemini proxy for the World Wide Web
As a quick note, while hacking around the code to make it fit nicely to the stylesheet it uses, I stumbled upon a bug where it would read from uninitialized memory for the HTML "lang" attribute if the Gemini server didn't provide any. I somehow had forgotten about this, considering I also hit the same issue the last time I used it, but now I emailed Omar to tell them about this, and they replied back thanking me for reporting it, and that it would be fixed in a following release to be made soon. :)
