Authors: Ben <benk@tilde.team>
Dated: 2021-03-22
Spring is in the air, and with it comes some very cool announcements about my capsule and the software that drives it:
First of all, you will notice that I'm writing to my logarion-based gemlog now, which is something I had put on hold for a while as Logarion was being overhauled / partially rewritten by the author. In the mean time I had focused mainly on logging to my generic gemlog on tilde.team, but slowly I'm going to start getting back into this as Logarion now has some neat features, including:
The first item is the one I had been waiting for, but the second is turning out to be my favorite addition as it greatly streamlines the process of writing new content. Without this, Logarion has a somewhat complicated process of first having to create a file then variously mark it for publication before finally exporting it. I already have the exportation handled by a local script, so that is automated, and now I can add new entries with a single command!
The software can be found at:
This is another thing I'm pretty excited about. Some time ago I implemented feeds on my site using the gmisub software, which was great. On the downside, however, gmisub was slightly fussy. Setting it up was more of a project, which I did gladly, but in the long term one of the recurring issues was that the utility it used to fetch Gemini pages would return an error any time a capsule's TLS certificate had changed. Naturally, this happens a lot especially as you track more pages. The only way we knew of to fix this would be to clear the known certs and re-run the program.
Only two days, ago Alex // nytpu announced a new utility called "comitium" for doing what feed aggregators do best. After getting it up and running on my system, I noticed the following benefits of the software:
The "handles everything" part means that it can track Gemini-formatted feeds, RSS/Atom/JSON, can simply watch pages for changes, and I believe it even crosses protocols. In other words, you can use it to subscribe to almost anything at all. That means it does everything Spacewalk, Capcom, and gmisub do plus more, all into a single feed. That's powerful!
It looks very cleanly written, storing all a feed's data in a single nice-looking JSON file. Barring any bugs yet to be discovered, it seems perfect. So I look forward to keeping the feeds on my site clean and up to date. (There's only one now, but it should be easy now to maintain multiple moving forward.)
Link: