💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1616 captured on 2024-05-10 at 11:06:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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I've been working on converting my blog site to a gopher/gemini version in the last two or three days. Since I was new to this, I implemented very basic functionality, but after a few days of ridiculous cold snaps, I realized I wanted to know the weather in cities around the world. So I made an API call to get a global current weather list and stored it in a document. Then, periodically (every couple hours or so), I would run this API call script to update that document.
But at this point, I suddenly have a question. I am not sure whether serving dynamic content rather than fixed content like this is in line with the original purpose of gopher or gemini protocol. I hated the hustle and bustle of the web, and started working on migrating my blog platform with the idea of keeping it as simple as possible and focusing on the content itself, but now I'm starting to feel like I'm going down a different path. If the content of the document changes, I don't know whether it will lose its value as information, whether it will have more value, or whether the change in the document content and its value are separate things.
What do others think?
go for it!
Hi ~monpetit, and welcome to gopher/geminispace.
I've been in the Gemini community now for a number of years, participated in the mailing list for a long time, and am the author of a Gemini server (Space-Age). I don't think there is anything wrong or un-Gemini with serving dynamic content in any of your capsules. Gemini doesn't allow for any client-side programming (for many good reasons), but it does promote server-side programming for dynamic capsules in the classic CGI (Common Gateway Interface) style of late 1990s and early 2000s web programming.
I host a Gemini capsule at my workplace, which is used as my software team's internal wiki. While much of our content is simply static Gemtext files or downloadable resources (e.g., source code, config files, screenshots), our capsule does contain several pages that are dynamically rendered by server-side scripts. Using this, I've been able to create simple server status dashboards, a basic text-mode interface to Jira, and so on.
Outside of work, I check the weather using Gopher everyday, tend my Astrobotany plant in Geminispace, and of course visit the Midnight Pub in my Gemini browser.
Have fun and enjoy exploring and creating great new content on these alternative networks. I'll see you there!