💾 Archived View for agnos.is › posts › a-gemini-first-website.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 09:38:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Published: 2024-12-05T11:24:00+01:00
No, I'm not talking about the Google AI model.
I'm talking about the Gemini protocol.
But chances are, if you're reading this post, you already know that I'm talking about the protocol:
Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. [...] We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents.
When I created this site, it was essentially my return to having a personal website on the internet. At first, I only had the Gemini capsule; the HTML version was added later. But why create a Gemini capsule and ignore the normal HTTP Web? The first reason was, simply, because I could.
But there were other reasons:
Gemini, by design, is very simple. Perhaps too simple. The gemtext format is similar to Markdown, but stripped down to its barest essential components:
There is no styling of text in Gemtext. There is no bold, italics, or underlines. There are no inline code snippets. Only code blocks. This forces the author (me!) to focus on the best possible presentation of the text. What little styling is possible over Gemini protocol is up to the user's browser.
Although Geminispace is populated almost exclusively by tech nerds, I try to design my capsule for people who are NOT tech nerds. This is my personal site, not an obscure git repository.
The forced simplicity of Gemini and its native text format, gemtext, carries over to the Web version of this capsule. The Web version is static HTML, and is designed to appear more or less exactly the same way as the capsule appears in a Gemini browser.
The result is a fast-loading website that renders well on both desktop and mobile form factors. There is no JavaScript, and navigating the site is as good as I am able to make it.
The original goal with creating the site in Gemini was to make it easy to maintain. It is easy to create content for it. Admittedly, though, creating this website did turn into an exercise of making my own static site generation pipeline. This is not the definition of "simple" for regular people. The site is actually stored in a git repo and built and updated via a CI (continuous integration) pipeline. Any change I make to the site is immediately deployed and visible on both the Gemini capsule and the HTML version.
Most of the heavy lifting is done by gempost.
The main Gemlog and the Astroponic Garden are treated as two separate "capsules" by Gempost. The "main site" contains the Gemlog you are now reading, and the rest of the content as pages. The Astroponic Garden is the tinylog formatted stream of consciousness.
Because everything for creating and building the site is in place, creating content "just works." But it took a while to get there.
When I was writing this post, I originally used the term "content-driven." But I quickly changed it to content-first. In my mind, "content-driven" more refers to a marketing-centered experience. I don't want to "drive" things. Content-first is a better way to explain what I want out of Gemini. The idea is that the CONTENT informs the design (what little of it is possible) and not the other way around.
Gemtext forces you to get creative when it comes to presenting a beautiful experience to the reader. I am very particular about how a page looks in Gemini browsers, and I design this capsule with that in mind.
It's hard to quantify exactly WHAT particulars I have. But it tends to be:
The biggest challenge for me has been presenting an engaging layout without making the text overly dense or hard to follow.
License: CC-BY-SA-4.0.
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