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Your gemlogs and feed generators and all of that stuff, I mean. I want to be able to have stuff like "Write stuff that's on my mind, tag it with what the topic is, and it'll appear in a chronological page+feed of all my thoughts, and a seperate page+feed based on that topic". I want to just write some thoughts down and all the fiddly, repetitive stuff gets done for me, basically.
I also have no clue where to start with hosting, I know very little about this stuff, and it seems like the assumed level of tech literacy is above mine >_>'
2023-06-20 · 3 weeks ago · 👍 Addison, murdock
that's what i'm trying to figure out too. I already have a domain and a website, I might create a subdomain and point it at one of the gemini hosts out there. Here are two that I saw that looked nice:
I already use Jekyll to generate my blog, which does everything you're asking for, but for web, and there's the jekyll-gemini plugin to automate gemini output next to web output too. But if you're starting from scratch, that's probably too much to set up. You might just be able to sign up at one of the above and plonk away at your keyboard to make posts?
@lizsugar yeah, i signed up at cities.yesterweb.org a while ago and have been plonking away fine over there. I just want to start dipping my toes into the more fancy stuff, and spending less time manually editing index pages and more time writing random nonsense :P
I really like capsule.town, but you just send the API a tarball; it won’t help you make your Gemlog and such. There are a few tildes that offer web tools for authoring like [smol.pub] and [gemlog.blue], but I have no idea if they have the features you want.
There are also a fair few tildes focused on education – as I understand it, people there can help teach you how to use tools like Jekyll (for example) as well as providing a place to host them.
There’s a bunch of resources available in the directories:
— gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi?65
— gemini://cdg.thegonz.net/infrastructure/hosting/
The next step up from manually updating all the indices and links is to use a script that does it for you. Here's a Python script I use on my gemlog:
— skyjake.fi/misc/makeindex.py
It does a main index, archive of older posts, and per-tag indices, plus an Atom feed with the titles and links.
My capsule is updated via git, and I wrote a shell script to update my gemlog index pages before they are committed to the repository. The script regenerates each index page from scratch based on all the gemlog files that are present. When the repository behind the public-facing capsule is updated, another script regenerates all my Atom feed files from scratch as well. The scripts are ugly and full of hacks, but they do what I need them to do.
For me, the more work it is, the less I'm likely to do it. So to write content on my capsule, I literally write .gmi files in a text editor (TextMate on a Mac) and save them in some folders. What's in my capsule is just files and folders on disk. I upload those files to the server that hosts my capsule. I used to use sftp to upload them (specifically with Transmit, a Mac app) but then I wrote a 1 line command script that uses rsync to synchronize my local folder of text files with the server. So "publishing" is writing content, saving it to a file, and running running that script
I'm in the midst of cobbling together some cgi scripts that let me post to my tinylog and gemlog (via titan for longer posts) on my own capsule. I limit access to just my client cert. this keeps me from having to log in via ssh and I can draft thoughts pretty much anywhere on my phone.
If self hosting and coding is out, I'd def go with the suggestions already mentioned. web interface options might be the easiest choice.
2023-06-21 · 3 weeks ago
I ssh into my pubnix (capsule provider) through the terminal, write up a gemtext file manually, submit it to antenna, and cosmos picks up antennas feed a little while later. I plan to make a video series about how to use gemini at some point.
I wrote a capsule generator in Rust that works similar to Jekyll/Hugo/Zola etc. You write gemtext posts and it builds it into a static site.
It should do just about everything you mentioned and a few more tricks besides.
It is a cli application, but I've tried to give it good documentation. The markdown docs get built into html as part of the build and it comes with man pages as well. There's a config file for your capsule, but you can generate a starter config from the cli with 'zond init'.
I've been planning on doing another release soon. Runs on at the very least Linux and FreeBSD but it would probably compile and run on Mac or Windows as well. If you're interested let me know and I'll hurry up with the release.
I was able to get the jekyll-gemini plugin working (the problem was a misread of the documentation lol s🤦♀️), but now i'm in the not-so-fun part of developing my own jekyll layout files specifically for the gemini output. At least that's a lot more straightforward than anything in HTML.
Once I get the layout files to a good place, I'll shove them up on github so others can use it as a starting point too
I write everything in a text editor (a GUI one, not a smarty-pants terminal one like most people here probably use) and then upload my files to the place where they're hosted. As for the hosting, I really don't know the first thing about servers or any of that; I just followed the instructions in the README file for the server I use.
Admittedly, I did end up writing a couple of scripts to automate some of the more tedious parts of my workflow, namely generating the feed page for my gemlog and uploading files to the server from my computer. But I only did those things after I did them manually so often that I got sick of it.
Honestly: If you can write a plain text file, you're already most of the way toward hosting content on Gemini.
I use Omar Polo's gmid server on FreeBSD which is really easy to install and configure. But I understand that all that commandline things are a little overwhelming at first. But if you choose one of the free gemini hosting providers you should only need to upload your gemini folder structure (I believe).
For creating my gemlog index and feed file I use nytpu's gemlog.sh script, which generates these two files automatically from my gemlog folder, where all my posts are stored. There is a sample configuration as starting point.
— https://git.sr.ht/~nytpu/gemlog.sh
If I'm happy with the result I run my 'upload-site.sh' script which consists of only one line (after the #!/bin/bash shebang). That updates my site on the server from the local copy. I've installed my ssh public key on the server so I'm not prompted for a password.
rsync -av public_gemini/ _gmid@foobucket.xyz:chroot/
Thats it for the most part. You can also write a little oneliner to send your feed to antenna of course. But it's all not magic. Just take your time.
wait is this who i think it is 👀 if so hiiiii :3
I'm still working on my static site (static capsule?) generator think right now, but as is i just have some perl scripts that create the directories and stuff for me automatically. there's a few such feeds
there's some fiddly bits involved still but that's why I'm trying to write myself software to get rid of those, too. plus i feel server side scripting is a silly solution when the output of the script doesn't change except when i upload more content
my ideal is to write a post with a title heading, a heading marking the body, and upload it like that and have magic do the rest for me. maybe a tag system is good too
2023-06-23 · 3 weeks ago
in terms of self-hosting, i am just running molly-brown. it's fairly painless if you have a VPS, the only gripe was getting port 1965 unblocked by my hosting provider (spent forever trying to figure out what was wrong with it on my VPS but i guess they blocked it external to that and i had to fix it on their silly online dashboard), but idk what your experience is exactly with webhosting backend stuff. i could probably say more if i had more context about your experience level? idk
there's a lot less to configure than like nginx from what i recall, so i can spend more time focusing on frontend of my capsule
I made some really solid progress with jekyll-gemini and did a small self-host on oracle's free tier cloud services, using agate as my gemini server.
There's some stuff that while supported by jekyll isn't implemented in my Gemini layout files yet like listing posts by tag and collections, but it's enough to publish.
I'm dubiously trying to co-publish to web and gemini simultaneously, so there's some consideration I need to take when composing posts, but going gemini only works great.
I also really prefer static page generation. Serverside scripting just adds complexities that I don't want to manage. Really happy I was able to get this working with the system I already used
I do everything manually. I edit manually my feed pages, I upload manually my gmi files. I manually update my gemlog on Antenna.
Tools are MC (TUI dual panel file manager) to ssh into my VPS and Micro as editor. Since I my pace is slow handling the capsule manually is not a big deal...
wow there is just. so much help and passion and personal experience in these replies, thank you all <3 It would take me a month to answer everyone individually- but thank you all so much. (also hiii @starling yes we know each other )
2023-06-24 · 2 weeks ago