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🧠 The Synchronicity of Gemini

I spent several years and as web developer, before I got lucky enough to do what I do now. In the before-times, sans npm, CSS2 and javascript frameworks. I've also blogged, in one form or another, since then, first on Live Journal, and then later on my own hosted server, with my own blogging software.

When I joined the games industry I let that tail off a little. As a junior at a large company I was worried about having an opinion online. And then, as a more experienced developer, I simple didn't have the time. Micro-blogging seemed to cover the itch. But I've always hankered after a space where I could just blog like I did in the old days.

In 2015, as an independent, I finally resurrected my blog and decided to generate it using Jekyll. Static appealed to the developer in me, and my hope was that it would be fast and secure. And this was good, for a while, but as the nightmare of 2016 unfolded I wasn't willing to slide into the political debate online, so I slowly backed away from it. Over the next couple of years I'd end up deleting Facebook, Instagram and my personal twitter account, as well, but the itch to blog remained.

Earlier this year I decided to try again, but I suffered several dependency related breakages with my Jekyll setup, which was incredibly frustrating... So I wrote my own site generator, in C, to parse Jekyll markdown templates.

It's a few hundred lines of code, with no dependencies, that generates a site in a couple of hundred milliseconds. It's not generic in anyway, probably wouldn't work for anyone else's needs, but it serves my purposes perfectly and has morphed into a tool I use generate my company blog each week.

Despite all this I still wasn't happy with my personal blog. It was just pages, attached to nothing, floating around in the web, another opinion shouting in the void with no real purpose or direction. And technically, what I really wanted was something even simpler. A way to quickly post up text with the minimum of fuss. I wasn't even thinking about community at that point.

And then xkp's Dork Web posting mentioned Gemini, and a light went off in my head. Here it is, a simple, text-based way to post, that harkens back to the era of the web I was missing. And more importantly it's open, and people centric.

So here I am.

I'm not sure what direction this Gem Log is going to take. I've back "ported" a few of my earlier blog posts, and I'll probably convert a few more. And then, hopefully over the next few weeks, I'll have the time to dip my toes in a little more and see what voice this ends up with.

I'm toying with an Amiga quite a lot atm, so maybe a few posts about that.

Hello everyone!