┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
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Rabbit rabbit.
It's been fun getting more of a hang of Gemini Protocol formatting and arranging for this lil' capsule of mine. Given how much stuff I've had on my website/weblog "The Digital Ambler" for years now, and given how the best way to make geminispace fuller is to fill it with neat things (the whole "if you build it they will come" approach), I've been taking a look at some of the pages and main information posts I've made there over the years and made equivalent pages here. On the one hand, it's been fun to see what I actually think is nice to carry over versus what I don't think needs to be here (at least not yet); on the other, it's also been fun (and somewhat of a challenge) get things touched up and reformatted for gemtext markup.
It's that latter that really shoves my face into rethinking how I do text-based communication, because even on Discord, there's still at least some niceties of formatting like italics, bolding, or the line, which aren't part of gemtext at all. While gemtext allows for some structural stuff (headers, quote blocks, preformatted blocks, bulleted lists), there's nothing more than that—which is by design, of course, as part of a "pure text" approach that I think is useful and beautiful on its own terms. That said, after working in HTML-centric stuff for so long where I get to have more features at hand—or, heck, LaTeX as well for all my formal writing needs which is of course very well fleshed-out and highly extensible in its own ways—remembering that I'm operating here in a barely-glorified .txt format is actually something of a refreshing challenge. To that end, I've been experimenting with how I format, for instance, some of the prayers I've put up on this capsule; some use quoteblocks, some use preformatted blocks, depending on whether I need linebreaks or not.
Speaking of experimenting, I'm also used to my Wordpress-esque URL slugs. I mimicked that for my earlier post (using a format "YYYYMMDD-post-title"), but for this one, I'm going to note how the default smol.pub format is (which should just be the timestamp of the post being published). We'll see how I like it and whether I want to just let smol.pub do its thing or whether I want to be more specific. (EDIT: okay, it uses the Unix timestamp, that works well enough for me.)
Anyway, I've been fleshing out my homepage here a bit with other pages, so if you're reading, take a look and get to know me a bit, and if you're amenable to checking out my stuff on the web, please feel free to do so! While I may not migrate my "main writing" from my Wordpress website here ("use the best tool for the job" &c.), perhaps having a quieter, personal log separate from that may well be a nice thing.