Commencing Countdown, Engines On
Sun 08 May 2022 12:44:56 PM EDT
In the last post I scraped the surface on getting myself introduced to gemini. Now, I think I’d kind of like to document what I’ve done to try and set up this little capsule and server. WARNING: this post may end up being a bit erratic–more like a scratchpad with a terrible brainstorming map scrawled on it. Apologies if that make things uninteresting or difficult to follow, but I can already feel that I’m not very focused–plus I’m attempting to lead you down a path of discovery that wasn’t very focused to begin with…
So, there I was, sitting at my desk and staring at that peculiarity on my screen:
http://homelinux.nsupdate.info:8081/x/gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/gemlog/20210602.gmi
…what was this gemini protocol from which this “gemlog” entry originated?
As stated previously, a quick google search led me to find a few answers–as well as lead me to discovering that there was even more odd stuff happening on the Internet. A retro-renaissance of sorts, I guess? A revolution? I don’t quite know how to describe it, really–perhaps because I don’t really understand it, and perhaps because I was not fully a part of the birth and growth of things to begin with–prior to this particular wave of Internet communications and presence. Anyway, with regard to to gemini I discovered that someone came up with the idea of establishing a new protocol not too disimilar from an older one–gopher. (That’s something else I never really played with much, outside of a few times in school while doing research–I was just too ill-informed to realize what I was using.) Since this was something new and relatively close to an older way of doing things, I figured I’d give it a shot–as it is something that somewhat goes along with my interests and walks very closely to this silly project of mine that will likely go nowhere.
So, how do I get into the geminispace? This was a bit more confusing than I thought it should be–I mean, I saw different links around for multiple browsing clients, but which one should I choose? Okay, pause for a second to acknowledge that I did try to explore a little bit via a couple of proxies. That experience was cool, I guess, and did encourage me to press forward with finding a dedicated client. But again, which client should I choose? Is there any particular client that is better than another, with regard to usuability and feature-set? And features? Really? I mean what features am I really looking for when it comes to browsing a network of text? In the end, I figured that I was just trying to overcomplicate things and apply the logic of the current world-wide-web to a network that is a hell of a lot simpler. Simplicity; that should be the focus. So, no graphical UI; let’s go with something that is character based. After looking at a couple of options, I chose Amfora.
https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
gemini://makeworld.space/amfora-wiki
Awesome. I have a client. Let’s get to browsing. But–heh, heh, there’s that one question again–where to start? There is no Google here, no CNN, no funky ISP splash page… so, where do I begin? Well, first I began with loading Amfora’s help page so that I could try to commit to memory a few basic key commands; knowing how to use the program is always a good idea, right? After that, I chose to simply go back to the Project Gemini page–this time natively!–and then simply follow a few links from there.
After a bit of wandering around and scraping the surface of what all is out there–and it would seem that there is liekly more out there than we actually know about–I decided it was time to set up my own little capsule.
Remember that bit just a few lines ago where I said that deciding upon a browsing client was a bit confusing and complicated for me? Well, a little more of the same happened here…
There are several hosts out there for you to create your own little capsule on–a surprising number, in my opinion. All are free at the moment, from what I see. Some are exclusive, in a sense, in that they’re running on a “club-membership” server–if you’re a member of some sort of computing club, chances are decent that you’ve got the ability to set up a capsule there; of course, chances are you already have, and are sitting there thinking I’m a blathering idiot. Anyway, I poked around looking at hosts for a very brief moment, and then realized I could simply run my own server software and not have to worry about finding shared space to occupy–and furthermore not worry about potentially upsetting someone in the future and getting kicked from there server! (I’ve never experienced anything like that, but it’s always been a constant fear of mine… but that’s definietely another story.) So, the hunt for server software…
After reading a few different reviews–which there didn’t seem to be that many in my searches–and finding a couple of personal experiences written online, I settled on Agate:
https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate
Setup and installation of Agate was pretty easy; I don’t recall having any major hoops to jump through or really any tweaks that I needed to make in order to get things up and running. Overall, I’d say that portion of things was relatively painless, once I reminded myself once again to try and keep from looking for ways to complicate things. Complicating things, however, seems to be what I do best, and leads us into the next step of what I wanted to try and achieve; I wanted to figure out a way to mirror things–just like the page that led me down this rabbit hole to begin with.
I really don’t remember the paths and searches I took next in order to get where I landed–and my browsing history is a mess on top of things, so I really have no way of trying to reconstruct the chain of events that led me there. I can, however, tell you that I did finally settle upon a little package of scripts called Gemtexter:
https://foo.zone/gemfeed/2021-06-05-gemtexter-one-bash-script-to-rule-it-all.html
gemini://foo.zone/gemfeed/2021-06-05-gemtexter-one-bash-script-to-rule-it-all.gmi
https://codeberg.org/snonux/gemtexter
…and, of course, with this, I decided to try and complicate things more. I did make a few little tweaks to the scripts in order to have it fit the way I wanted things organized… I changed the file locations and the directories referenced, as well as added in the ability to put a date stamp on pages for when it’s run. All of that probably would have went a lot better if I knew what I was doing–see, I’m very much still the novice when it comes to Linux and scripting–or coding and programming anything in any language, for that matter. After hours of struggling and discovery–again, because I don’t know what I’m doing–I got it to work the way I wanted. YAY!!!
…but can I get it to also convert and push things to a WordPress install? (There I go, trying to complicate things, again.) As of this moment, I’m going to have to say the answer is no, at least not that I’ve managed to figure out. It looks like one of the file formats that Gemtexter outputs–MarkDown–could be used very easily for ultra simplicity, and that one additional hooked script could push it into WP via the wp-cli with a few git hooks tied into the WP installation as well… but I’m not that knowledgeable. So I opted instead to create a totally different, separate script that I can run after Gemtexter to push the most recent HTML encoded entry into my WP install via the cli.
So, I don’t know… I guess that my story for now. I hope to come back soon with something other than stories surrounding trying to explore geminispace, and get a little further into what I’m really wanting to try and accomplish, here. Until then…
Thanks for reading;
–J
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