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Not Strictly Meta

I’ve been browsing the Gemini community and it’s great. There’s content that ranges from journal style posts about random stuff to highly technical and specific content that I find to be wonderful. There’s in-between stuff like fiction and poetry, too. You know, I’m not representing the range of material very well. Suffice to say, there’s a lot of content to keep me occupied and I’m really enjoying what I’ve been reading.

There’s also social network style stuff that looks pretty intriguing, but I’m more interested in the software that they were built with than in joining. I also don’t want to jump head first into a bunch of new stuff only to disappear after a month or so like I’ve done on other platforms. Maybe I’ll lurk for a while and then join something, but I should pace myself.

Anyway, as I read stuff and see how others are portraying information on Gemini, I’ve been reformatting some of my notes to fit a little better, but that’s sort of neutral. In spots I’ve been inspired to represent data differently, but for the most part, there’s no problem fitting everything in the Gemini format.

I need color (I think)

There is one place that I’m having trouble, and that’s in making use of colors. I suppose, in theory, color and presentation are supposed to be up to the client. But in some of my notes I’m experimenting with the use of color to make it easier to isolate content. I suppose it might be a way to graphically represent a semantic categorization to facilitate absorption or at least speed up the process of parsing the information, but I don’t have the language to describe what it really is. Colors are there as a reference and a visual distinction between function of the components and the overall phrase. Maybe an easily ignored visual parenthetical?

Put simply, I have some language notes that use color to break phrases up into groups within the phrases where the color represents the relationship of the group of words to the phrase. Small phrases are built up in these notes and the relationships to the different parts of the phrases is maintained with color across the longer and longer phrases. The actual color used does not matter, just that there is color and it is consistent and preserved throughout the graph.

In their original format, I put them in graphs (graphviz style) and link them via images in my original notes, which then appear in-line when converted to ePub or HTML where I review them. This works fine viewed locally as everything is in a single document.

If I just convert the Markdown to Gemini I lose the consistency, have to browse back and forth to see either the graph or the explanations, and the colors are less valuable because I only see one image at a time.

Colors are bad

Pointless colors and style that exist only to be visually striking aren’t that useful, but in this case, the color conveys additional information similar to metadata tagging, and provides a function of visually distinguishing different groupings to facilitate internalizing the information.

It could be argued that it is not very accessible, and maybe I need to come up with some other means of separating the words in a phrase, such as with Unicode markers, but consider target audience (me,) format (visual,) and how well this even translates. My attempts at this have been clumsy so far. Using some random Unicode as a start and end marker is pretty terrible visually. It seems to work okay if all you are doing is listening to the phrase from start to finish, but the markers are more disruptive even like this. If I were to play sound effects while reading a phrase instead, I could make the sound effects (imagine something like different musical instruments) into quiet background noises so they’re less obtrusive, but play at the same time as a phrase is being read, then maybe this could work.

How the hell do I turn my text notes into that? Plus, much of the content I’ve written this way, I don’t have a way to read or convert to audio. It has definitely been intriguing enough of an idea that I keep circling back to it. It could be an interesting project, but doesn’t help me right now.

Images are okay

Gemini supports images, those are in the spec, and I can include links to images from my notes… Ultimately, an image shouldn’t be necessary and the same information in the graph could be represented on the page if I were able to use color in Gemini. A hybrid approach utilizing color in the graphs and on the page explaining them would work well, too, but again, no colors on Gemini. Just having a list of a few phrases in color could eliminate the need for the graphs.

What about ANSI colors?

ANSI color codes would be absolutely perfect for my use of color, but the major clients do not support ANSI. Or they do not support it out of the box. Or they claim to support it, but they’re broken or too difficult (for me) to enable.

Despite the configuration looking like it should support ANSI color, I can’t get Amfora (or any other client) to show me ANSI colors. The closest I’ve seen is gmni which is basically the wget or curl of Gemini. It’s the only client thus far that has been able to handle ANSI colors.

So now what?

I’m undecided. Maybe I’ll publish it in the awkward format it would show up as or maybe I’ll say to hell with it and incorporate ANSI colors knowing that it will look like crap in some browsers. Gemini does a pretty good job in other areas, maybe I just shouldn’t bother publishing anything that doesn’t fit in the existing format. I would still have it in other formats, I just wouldn’t be able to access it in times when Gemini is the only handy thing I can reach.

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