I failed to sleep in this morning, so I started reading some of the posts I had opened on Gemini from the previous day. This was a terrible idea because it’s fairly stimulating just to look at a screen, and it can be a bit frustrating to find all the keys on this laptop in the dark, but anyway, the awkwardness of browsing in the dark and exploring a new capsule made me realize that there was kind of an isolated feeling to the experience of browsing a foreign capsule.
The layout of a Gemlog is commonly some sort of chronological list of links, each link going to a page of content, but then there’s commonly no way forward or back except via the browser or via a link that dumps you back on the page that got you to the post. This isn’t bad, but if you’re browsing in the dark and you’re on a foreign capsule where you want to read chronologically, you have to keep hunting for the next link, or at least doing something to go back and forth to an index.
This got me to thinking it might be nice to have a next and previous link from pages that are explicitly linked by the index. This would at least eliminate having to return to the index, but it might also make it easier for fellow insomniacs to find the next link.
Feature creep? What’s that? I’m going to go hit that source. If it goes well, expect some new navigation buttons on the log content. Success! First go actually made the first post’s previous link loop back around to the last post. I debated keeping it, but ultimately added a test to make sure the index wouldn’t go negative.
Also, anyone else feel like they’re a part of some secret community? I thought that kinder, calmer internet nonsense was just nonsense, but I’m finding Gemini to be an eerily cozy place.
updated: 2022-12-12 22:54:35 -0500
generated: 2023-03-12