💾 Archived View for gemi.dev › gemini-mailing-list › 000515.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 12:53:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Gemini work is nowhere near top priority for me because it's not a
responsibility, but I'd like to pay the community back a bit and these are
the ideas that come to mind:
1) Write (and possibly host) a Project Gutenberg server that will allow you
to search PG's plain-text etexts and serve them up. This would provide
large amounts of (admittedly non-unique) content in Geminispace. I've done
some preliminary work on this.
2) Write (and not host) a server front-end that provides cert-controlled
access to a capsule or portions thereof. Currently I think only Molly
Brown supports this facility, but this facility would allow someone wanting
to provide such private support to run any Gemini server as long as it was
not directly accessible from the Internet and then aim the front end at
it. I have a good idea how this would work, but haven't done any
preliminary work yet.
Preferences, suggested project names, comments?
John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org
Possession is said to be nine points of the law,
but that's not saying how many points the law might have.
--Thomas A. Cowan (law professor and my father)
It was thus said that the Great John Cowan once stated: > > 2) Write (and not host) a server front-end that provides cert-controlled > access to a capsule or portions thereof. Currently I think only Molly > Brown supports this facility, GLV-1.12556 also has this capability if I understand you correctly---protect different portions of a Gemini server with different client certificates. Or are you talking about something different? -spc (An example of what you want would be nice)
Both of them sound awesome. On the Gutenberg: could you also split the books into smaller pages (a couple of screens length)? A few years ago I made a website which served full book text in a single HTML page and had a tiny script which remembered the scroll position (saved it in a cookie). What I learned from the project: 1. Just scrolling was more comfortable for reading than paging on my smartphone. 2. You can return to a middle of a book after ~a year and continue reading from the saved position without a problem. Since cookies, JS and scroll positions do not work with Gemini, smaller pages could serve the same function. Side question: has anyone tried to hack something Gemini-related on e-book readers? On 11/30/20 10:15 PM, John Cowan wrote: > Gemini work is nowhere near top priority for me because it's not a > responsibility, but I'd like to pay the community back a bit and these > are the ideas that come to mind: > > 1) Write (and possibly host) a Project Gutenberg server that will > allow you to search PG's plain-text etexts and serve them up.? This > would provide large amounts of (admittedly non-unique) content in > Geminispace. I've done some preliminary work on this. > > 2) Write (and not host) a server front-end that provides > cert-controlled access to a capsule or portions thereof.? Currently I > think?only Molly Brown supports this facility, but this facility would > allow someone wanting to provide such private support to run any > Gemini server as long as it was not directly accessible from the > Internet and then aim the front end at it.? I have a good idea how > this would work, but haven't done any preliminary work yet. > > Preferences, suggested project names, comments? > > > > John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan > <http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan> cowan at ccil.org <mailto:cowan at ccil.org> > Possession is said to be nine points of the law, > but that's not saying how many points the law might have. > ? ? ? ? --Thomas A. Cowan (law professor and my father)
On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 4:58 PM Emilis <emilis at emilis.net> wrote: Both of them sound awesome. > Thanks! > On the Gutenberg: could you also split the books into smaller pages (a > couple of screens length)? > I think it would be hard to read 80-column plain text on a phone footprint. I could try to convert it to text/gemini, but there would be issues with figuring out where to insert ``` lines. Gutenberg texts are from 1991 to the present, and they don't all have exactly the same internal layout. > Since cookies, JS and scroll positions do not work with Gemini, smaller > pages could serve the same function. > I would think that a GUI Gemini browser should be able to remember the scroll position. Lagrange definitely does: open it on a long page, close it, reopen it: the page will be in the same position. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org This great college [Trinity], of this ancient university [Cambridge], has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, somewhere betwixt and between. --A.E. Housman
On 1. Dec 2020, at 2:20, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote: > I would think that a GUI Gemini browser should be able to remember the scroll position. Lagrange definitely does: open it on a long page, close it, reopen it: the page will be in the same position. A bit of clarification: Lagrange remembers scroll positions in navigation history (so for back/forward and app restore), but not in bookmarks. The scroll position is reset to the top when opening a link, even if a scroll position is saved for the page in history. I think it would be a bit confusing to land somewhere in the middle/bottom of a page just because you visited it sometime in the past. (Web browsers don't do this but I haven't tried it in practice, maybe I should?) For the book reading use case, a bookmark that saves scroll position could work. --jaakko
On 12/1/20 7:15 AM, skyjake wrote: > For the book reading use case, a bookmark that saves scroll position could work. > And this is where one starts to wonder if this should be a feature of a browser or a feature of some browser extension/plugin. -- Emilis Dambauskas gemini://tilde.team/~emilis/
> Side question: has anyone tried to hack something Gemini-related on e-book readers? Somewhere on my (extensive) todo list is an item that says "convert gemtext to epub"... Just not sure when I'll get to it or how I'll do it :D - ew0k
Bj?rn W?rmedal <bjorn.warmedal at gmail.com> writes: >> Side question: has anyone tried to hack something Gemini-related on e-book readers? > > Somewhere on my (extensive) todo list is an item that says "convert > gemtext to epub"... Just not sure when I'll get to it or how I'll do > it :D There's already tooling to go gemtext -> html -> epub, so it's just a matter of chaining it together. -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Jason F. McBrayer jmcbray at carcosa.net | | A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, | | even though we do not love it. -- Dogen |
John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> writes: > 1) Write (and possibly host) a Project Gutenberg server that will > allow you to search PG's plain-text etexts and serve them up. This > would provide large amounts of (admittedly non-unique) content in > Geminispace. I've done some preliminary work on this. Be sure to check out gemini://booksin.space/. They're working on a more curated approach, I think, similar to Standard Ebooks, but they'd probably appreciate work on tooling. -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Jason F. McBrayer jmcbray at carcosa.net | | A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, | | even though we do not love it. -- Dogen |
Cool, thanks! On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 8:33 AM Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote: > John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> writes: > > > 1) Write (and possibly host) a Project Gutenberg server that will > > allow you to search PG's plain-text etexts and serve them up. This > > would provide large amounts of (admittedly non-unique) content in > > Geminispace. I've done some preliminary work on this. > > Be sure to check out gemini://booksin.space/. They're working on a more > curated approach, I think, similar to Standard Ebooks, but they'd > probably appreciate work on tooling. > > -- > +-----------------------------------------------------------+ > | Jason F. McBrayer jmcbray at carcosa.net | > | A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, | > | even though we do not love it. -- Dogen | >
skyjake <skyjake at dengine.net> wrote: > For the book reading use case, a bookmark that saves scroll position could > work. > If I ever get around to writing the client I dreamed of 6 months ago, it would only bookmark specific lines in a document (with a bias to bookmarking the first line) -- Katarina >
> Be sure to check out gemini://booksin.space. They're working on a more > curated approach, I think similar to Standard Ebooks, but they'd > probably appreciate work on tooling. I initiated the project a while back, but I've been too busy to actually work on it. I've been waiting for things to settle down around here, but I don't know if they are going to haha Anyone who wants to contribute is more than welcome. I had considered doing a PG mirror in the past and actually downloaded their archives to see what it would entail. I think that will be a fun project for John and for Geminispace in general. I think Jason is right that booksin.space is/will be more curated, at least in that its shelves will be populated with books people directly contribute. Also, I plan to include non-public domain works as well-- things like preprints of academic articles, sheet music, or whatever other works whose copyright owners allow me to publish them. If a PG mirror existed in Geminispace, then contributing your favorite books to booksin.space would as simple as sending me a link :b Looking forward to seeing more things like this grow in Geminispace (and also looking forward to having some more time to play here myself!) ~mieum gemini://rawtext.club/~mieum/
On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 2:32 AM mieum <mieum at namu.blue> wrote: > Anyone who wants to contribute is more than welcome. > I tried posting to the mailing list, but it's sooooo picky, I'm not sure if my email went through. (Several previous tries failed.) > If a PG mirror existed in Geminispace, then contributing your favorite > books to booksin.space would as simple as sending me a link :b > Gutengemi will serve text/plain; it will be up to someone else to convert to text/gemini if that is desired. However, I will be converting all encodings to UTF-8. Note that it is not an archive, but fetches and converts text on the fly. That way I don't have to obey the rules about setting up a PG mirror. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians. - Russ Rymer
> I tried posting to the mailing list, but it's sooooo picky, I'm not > sure if my email went through. (Several previous tries failed.) Interesting. I did receive your post to the list, not sure what caused that. > Note that it is not an archive, but fetches and converts text on the > fly. That way I don't have to obey the rules about setting up a PG > mirror. Oh! That's clever! Those "rules" were a concern of mine as well. There is nothing wrong with them per se, it's just that it requires a certain level of commitment to being a steward of their data and service. ~mieum gemini://rawtext.club/~mieum/
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