💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~aprilnightk › gemlog › 2022 › 08 › 12-capsule-update.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 16:37:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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2022-08-12 - Capsule update

Recently I finally got around to update how this site is built and updated. The whole process was a disorganized pain!

Basically, this site exists in two variants - a Gemini capsule and a HTTP-copy which is generated from the gmi-files.

I have written my own static generator called June. I have the contents of my capsule (in gemini format) in a git-repository. June reads these contents and rebuilds the ~/public_gemini and ~/public_html directories on the server, from where the sites are served. The HTTP site is equipped with a custom CSS style, but bottom line it's just direct gmi->html translation.

The have been problems with my routine:

I didn't even have a proper git repository for June itself, for some reason I just scp-ed it to my tilde server account. I don't know why it was this way, it's so counter to the way I usually do things! I fixed that now.

The images, audotracks and other media files have been a pain. The initial design was that they resided in the same contents git repository (which isn't a great idea, big binary files may bloat quickly). Even worse, June had to copy them _twice_ into /res and /img folders under both the HTTP and Gemini server root folders. I've been itchy to solve this stupid duplication for months. Finally I realised it would be a good idea to remove them from the site's git repo altogether. These are resource files, they better be transferred to the server by simple scp! More than that, now they reside in a special resources directory to which both ~/public_html and ~/public_gemini have access using a soft link. So basically, you can now download some of my music both from the big Internet and Gemini, and it will be the same file physically.

Things feel much better now, I still have some internal links to refresh but nothing too important.

Also, I made a split gemlog feed that I would give to Antenna, so that it didn't have to index silly things that would be of no interest to Antenna's audience (like this entry, for example). So there's a gemlog feed with all posts in bulk, and a separate "sub-feed" for posts that I put to Antenna.

It's been quite a productive day!

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Keith Aprilnight (aprilnightk@tilde.team)