💾 Archived View for gmi.schrockwell.com › posts › 2024-05-03-new-site.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:42:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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May 3, 2024
It's a tradition observed by developers everywhere: the complete overhaul and redesign of the personal web site. Today, it's my turn.
This site is now published to the Web _and_ to Gemini. It's the same content, the same formatting, the same silly side projects – now on the creaky old Web and the shiny new Geminispace.
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I played around with Kirby CMS for a few weeks. It went _okay_. I like how Kirby starts as a barebones setup, and every additional feature is opt-in. It's endlessly customizable, the admin panel UI looks great, and the documentation is mostly complete.
But the whole thing felt really complex for a basic home page, I'm not super familiar with PHP, and the deployment story was kind of "meh". I really didn't like how schemas and content were inextricably coupled together in the same repo.
Plus, I wanted to put something "real" on Gemini. And I definitely did _not_ want to maintain content in two places with two different formats.
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The solution ended up being the simplest in nearly every way. There's one folder of Gemtext content, and a build script that statically generates both the web site and the Gemini capsule.
The build script is just shy of 400 lines of Ruby, which is a testament to the simplicty of Gemtext. Honestly, once GitHub Copilot figured out what I was trying to do, it did most of the work.
generate.rb <-- Build script
content/ <-- INPUT: Gemtext files, images, etc.
about/
posts/
projects/
index.gmi
_site/ <-- OUTPUT: Web site (HTML)
index.html
...
_capsule/ <-- OUTPUT: Gemini capsule (Gemtext)
index.gmi
...
The web site is built and hosted on Netlify, and the Gemini capsule gets rsync'ed to a Digital Ocean VPS running gemserv.
Now I can stop procrastinating and focus on the content.
There are still a few TODOs. A GitHub Action to deploy the Gemini capsule would be cool. And I would love to run the image assets through ImageMagick for resizing and sharpening. Should be easy enough to add.