💾 Archived View for d.moonfire.us › blog › 2020 › 11 › 20 › website-update captured on 2024-08-31 at 12:15:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Website Update

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I haven't been posting here lately. There are a number of reasons, but I'm going to have to go with the simple one: 2020. Lots of things all piling up, adding to to stress, and making just getting things difficult. Along the way, occasionally things slip to make sure other things continue.

Fedran[1] was one of those things. I've been working on maintaining my weekly chapters but it seems like I haven't been doing other than heads-down writing.

1: https://fedran.com/

One of my favorite methods for managing stress is obsessing about a little change that quickly blossoms into a much larger epic worthy of sailing across the ocean and trying to debate some sirens. Usually this ends up with me redoing one of my websites, rewriting my accounting system, or completely revamping one of my writing tools.

If you can't get, I have a “type” when it comes to reducing stress.

In this case, it was stumbling onto Gemini[2]. This is a stripped-down but still fairly capable protocol based on both Gopher and web browsing. It focused more on information but without stressing about the “pretty” part of the web. There are no themes, font choices, or a ton of links. Well, there can be links but they are one per line and clearly identified as such.

2: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Gemini appeals to me. Almost everything I create is already in written form, this seems like an ideal place to hang up a pole and see what happens. Not to mention, it's just fun to find new places to explore.

This also happened at the time when I had butted up against limitations in Gatsby[3], which I had just spent three months rewriting Fedran. I had switched to Gatsby because of flaws I encountered in Cobblestone, my own static site generator.

3: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/

That isn't to say, Gatsby doesn't make a beautiful sites. The trick they use to load the next page quickly was great. But it also is very heavy on the Javascript side of things which was pretty much the opposite of trying out Gemini which has no Javascript.

Since I rarely do things halfway, I want to migrate this site over to Gemini. This means either I stick with Cobblestone (which was already failing on me), convert it to Gatsby and to Gemini, or find something new.

Enter Statiq[4]. It's another static site generator that is one of my preferred languages (C#, Typescript, and apparently Rust) but it also allows for pipelines (what I liked about the Gulp-based Cobblestone) that would let me diverge the site between HTML and Gemini on the final steps while still allowing me the massive cross-referencing I use on Fedran.

4: https://statiq.dev/

I did consider switching Fedran, but after years of spinning wheels on redoing projects, I limit myself to one website rewrite a year. Otherwise, I would just endlessly redo my website and not actually create anything.

If you are reading this, then I've managed to switch over. Fortunately, http://d.moonfire.us/ is one of the more basic websites I have. That means I can build on it as I work toward the final boss, Fedran.