Talking point: blogging discovery

Created 2022-07-09 Updated 2022-07-09

I took a look at the Antenna blog aggregator:

antenna

with a view to see wherabouts people created their blogs. My blog index is stored in /blog.gmi, for example. Another site was in /posts.gmi. Some have an index page within some directory, some forego the index page, and so on. There seemed to be as many specific solutions as there were sites. This sucks from an automated discovery viewpoint. The purpose of this post is to stimulate discussion on how we can facilitate discovery.

I could just say that my way is the best way: have a file called /blog.gmi that points to all the blog entries. If you want more flexibility than that, then you'd need to add some kind of level of indirection. This introduces the risk of over-complication.

Before that, though, I think we should acknowledge 3 types of blogs:

I have both a regular and mini (/chips.gmi) blog on my site. Each type serves a different purpose.

If one were to go the route that has levels of indirection, then my proposal would be where security info is kept: i.e. in the "/.well-known" directory. I see two possibilites for this:

Whichever file was chosen, its contents could look something along the lines of:

# capsule blog meta-data
blog_regular: /blog.gmi
blog_mini: /chirps.gmi
blog_micro: /twtxt.gmi

Discuss.

Exits

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