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Hello World!

Well, I have created personal websites before so this isn't a perfect "Hello World" post. However, this is my first gemini capsule so I guess it's fine.

I've started this gemini capsule as kind of an outlet for my thoughts and to write about the things I'm learning or want to learn. I've created websites before but because of my perfectionist and not invented here (NIH) attitude, I've mostly abandoned them after finding an issue with them. My last attempt at creating a website led me to create a theme called kangae for the static site generator zola.

kangae, a lightweight microblog theme for zola

zola, a static site generator

Although working with zola was a pleasure and I really like how kangae turned out, I realized that Markdown isn't the markup format I want to use to write documents. The original Markdown implementation by John Gruber had several ambiguities and although this issue was addressed to an extent by CommonMark, it turns out that even CommonMark is hard to parse correctly because of a desire to maintain compatibility with Gruber's Markdown. John MacFarlane, the author of the CommonMark specification, has written a post titled "Beyond Markdown" which mentions the lingering issues with CommonMark which make it a "complicated beast".

Beyond Markdown by John MacFarlane

Unfortunately, I don't believe other markup formats like AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, or Org Mode are "better" alternatives.

A Gemini Capsule offers two things that a traditional HTTP website and most static site generators don't:

an unambiguous markup format called gemtext which is easy to parse
a deliberately minimalist approach to creating a personal space on the Internet which eliminates time spent on everything that's not related to writing content

Of course, getting these two things on the modern HTTP web aren't impossible but the fact that Gemini already has them out of the box makes it an attractive option to get started with. I still intend to create an HTTP version of this Gemini Capsule using the djot markup language, which is created by John MacFarlane. It strives to be an unambiguous markup language that's similar to CommonMark. As of 30th July 2023, I'm not aware of any static site generators that use djot as their primary markup format but I've discovered Soupault, which seems to be markup neutral.

Soupault, a static site generator

While I work on my HTTP website, I'll get started with writing content on Gemini.

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Created: 2023-07-30

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