💾 Archived View for going-flying.com › ~mernisse › 18.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:59:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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I mentioned back in my second gemlog post that I had, a long time ago, a penchant for hooking random things up to the Internet. The reality is that in one form or another the early days of the World Wide Web encouraged a lot of experimentation that seems largely to be discouraged now. It was at the very least an interesting challenge to see what you could create, or at least connect. In no small part the security concerns of putting things up on port 443, or I suppose out in general, weigh heavily upon me now when deciding what kind of silly things to build. There is a reason that to get to any of the Docker containers that I have running you have to go through at the very least Apache and then nginx. It's all about layers. Defense in depth. Not so much about fun. I ran into some archived PHP the other day when cleaning of a system I had made so you could play Zork 1 (and other old text adventures) online... It turns out the Internet Archive even snagged a copy of the website I made for it.
Gemini brings back some of that low-risk feeling for me. The places where it is more web like than gopher like open up just enough interesting possibilities, while still feeling like it is safe to experiment. Some of it is the architecture of the protocol, the ecosystem of the browsers, and the way I have this server isolated, but there is also a real feeling that putting something out on Gemini is more like putting it out to a small community.
All of that was just a long-winded nostalgia trip justifying the random novelty scripts I have found writing over the last few months. You can see them all listed on the root page of this capsule, and I finally got git.gmi working so you can browse the source if you are interested.
The most amusing novelty I have built so far is a bit of a junk drawer. It contains things I find myself needing to do from time to time and always searching for a quick web app to do it. It can convert number bases, base64 encode and decode, urlquote and unquote, convert UNIX time stamps to something human readable and a few more things.
More to come? Probably.
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