Setting up gemini

Whoo! my first blog post in the geminispace.

It turns out it's pretty easy to get a gemini site running. Just like with regular website, you just need to get a daemon running to serve it and feed it some content. One of the nice things is you don't have you care anymore about ssl/letsencrypt/acme since gemini runs on self-signed certificates.

In my case I've chosen gmnisrv to host this site. Mainly because it was the easiest to install on my server. It has basically no dependencies except for a compiler, libc and openssl. The nicest thing is that I don't have to install any new language runtimes.

So far editing gmi content is also pretty easy with vim, except that vim things single quotes in my text are strings so half of my paragraphs are colored like a string. I've looked into converting my http blog content into gemini content but it looks like that won't be a great fit. A lot of my content is quite dependent on images and the gemini spec hates images, because they're about images. The upside of the limitations is that it's quite easy to start a site since you don't have to care about the design at all.

[image] Screenshot of readerview rendering the previous version of this page

For testing my site I use my own browser (Readerview) so hopefully the content looks right on other implementations.

gmnisrv: a gemini server in C

Readerview: my gtk4 gemini client that's mostly broken