💾 Archived View for cetacean.club › journal › 07-31-2020-newsbook.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:59:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Newsbook Experiment

I have an experiment I'd like to try with Gemini logs. I would like to try and make a tool that will build a weekly eBook version of all of the gemlogs that I can and turn it into an archive of this space.

So far I have a prototype that currently is able to connect to gemlog atom feeds, read all of the entries that are less than a week old and then render them to markdown. I will then pass them to Pandoc[1] and create an ePub file, then pass that to kindlegen[2] and create a kindle-formatted eBook file.

[1]: Pandoc

[2]: Kindlegen

I would then make these eBook files available over gemini as a proof of concept.

Currently I have a gemini -> markdown converter that renders to somewhat messy but hopefully unambiguous markdown files. As an example, the output looks something like this:

## Post title

Post body etc etc

[A link](to://somewhere)


	foo bar
	bar foo


> This quote is an inspiration to us all

It converts first-level headers to second-level headers so that things will show up nicer in the rendered eBook files tables of contents.

I am thinking that each day (compared to UTC) would get its own chapter, and each gemlog post would get its own section. The dates and URLs of each post from relevant atom feeds would be preserved.

Other things I need to do:

Throttle post fetching (right now it just does it as fast as possible because my server software is efficient enough that it can just handle it)
Cache post files to the disk in some format (probably throw them into a SQLite file)
Create a tool that allows users to submit their own gemlog feeds to the eBook archival project
Create some kind of gemini presence for this project
Render eBook files with a weekly cronjob

Anyone have any feedback about this?