omg hiiiiiiiiii!! how we all doing? theres no comments on my blogs you can't answer that sorry
keep meaning to write a new gemlog post but i kept putting it off for various reasons (mainly due to workin on personal projects) and now i have a lot to talk about!!
FIRSTLY! welcome any/all newcomers who are here following the shutdown of cohost! hope you're all well!
it still feels so weird to me that cohost is closed now. that website had its flaws, which many have discussed far better than i could, but i enjoyed my time there and will really miss it. godspeed young eggbug...
September was, overall, a really fuckin good month. my dear darling girlfriend Jasmine came to visit me and we spent an incredible 10 days in London!!! it was so nice to see her again and i miss her so much nowwwww :(
she was also here for my birthday which was great.. it's so nice to spend a special day like that with someone i love. we went to the V&A (one of my all-time favourite places in London) and spent time there, then made our way to a bar where we got drinks with some of my friends :3
it's weird, i live so close to London that i never bothered doing the touristy shit. it's weird to engage in tourist traps etc. when they're on your doorstep, so i've never bothered before. but y'know what, some are really good!! highlights include getting a canal boat from Little Venice to Camden Market, going to the Tower of London, and going for a cute walk through Brompton Cemetery. i had no idea the Tower of London was actually like.. worth going to and wasn't just a tourist hell-hole. if i lived in London and getting to it was slightly cheaper i'd legit consider one of those member passes because it's a very nice place to spend a day honestly!!
worst part of the trip was having to say goodbye to my wifey and going home and sleeping in an empty bed :( i miss herrr
what else happened in september? well, my mum had a big 60th birthday party at the end of the month at a crazy golf place in London and it was very good! far better than when we had a work party at the same venue LOL
and of course, the other thing that happened recently.. they locked eggbug in a glass cage. rip cohost..
following cohost's shutdown announcement i sorta threw myself into too many projects at once relating to my blog & gemlog, hence the aforementioned procrastination of writing this post. a project i successfully finished was refactoring slimeblogger & adding atom feed support, so that's fun!!! one day i may add pagination to slimeblogger but the original design choice was intentionally one long blog page, so idk if i can be arsed.
managed to finally reach a point where i felt happy posting to my blog, because the Software™ i use for the blog is now in a state i'm happy with.
BUT. the same wasn't true of the thing i wrote to generate my gemlog LOL. toying again with the idea of making my gemlog visible to the http web, but this time i'm thinking about only making the RSS feed available over http. that way it's still my secret special hidden-away blog, but you don't have to open lagrange or amfora every time you wanna read it innit.
some of you may be reading this and thinking "wtf is gemini, what's a gemlog" because.. i plan on mirroring SOME select gemlog posts to my weblog! a sort of "here's a sneak peek at the Alice lore that you're missing" type of thing.
now.. i WAS going to somewhat automate this by writing a python package to convert gemtext to html. and that's still in the works!! but i wanted to write it as a proper package and publish to PyPI so that project is taking longer than planned while i spend time being extra thorough before publishing it. this is the current project that was holding up writing this post - i've decided to just convert this one post to HTML by hand innit LOL
i've really been enjoying reading people's thoughts and posts in my RSS feed, though i must admit i do also mark some posts as read without readingggg SORRYYY ;-;
some are just very long posts that are a bit too technical for me, or they're reviews of films/games i have no interest in so i just don't feel like reading the review innit. some are also long & detailed thinkpieces and its like.. well im checking my RSS feed like i used to check cohost - at work, or while sat on the toilet, or while scrolling on my phone when i get up in the morning, etc.
some i have saved and then read later when i felt i had the time to spare! but others i do just go "oh this one isn't for me i fear"
it feels rude/wrong to mark posts in my RSS reader as read but idk why because i scroll past posts all the time on twitter, tumblr, bluesky & scrolled past plenty on cohost too. weirdly it feels more like a personal slight in my RSS reader even though literally nobody would ever know if i didn't announce it LMAO
update on personal organisation from the last post: i bloody LOVE Zim. i'm using Syncthing to sync my notebooks on all my devices, and Markor to edit & view my files on my phone. i had all our plans, important documents & notes for the London trip on one of my Zim notebooks and it honestly made it so easy to be organised on the trip. i'm a full-on Zim convert. i've also customised my zim style, GTK theme & icon set for Zim only on both Windows AND Fedora now so it looks consistent, modern and beautiful. if you struggle staying organised i would really recommend it!
and now, dear readers, we're here once again: at the end of a gemlog, with me having no idea how to end it. i'm going to put some links down below relating to stuff from this post. click them or don't idk it's your choice <3
anyway: THX 4 READING BYE XOXO
details about the gemlog, for those of you reading this on the web who want to learn more
lagrange, the gemini browser i mentioned that's really the best one available on any platform