Small Web

Keeping it simple

=> Article "The small web is beautiful" by Ben Hoyt | smolweb - Promoting a simple unbloated web!

I maintain this sites content purely in Gemini's Gemtext format. Think of it like "Markdown, but much simpler". The raw format is super easy to read and write and in its simplicity forces you to think more about content than presentation. As an added benefit, it is accessible by default, adapting to any font- and display size. And it is going to be read- and parsable without complex software (aka web browsers) in the forseeable future, too! See below, "Gemtext Format" if you want to dive into the details.

This site is available via the Gemini protocol and converted to HTML via HTTPS. This is done via a very short PHP script, adding a minimalistic CSS framwork named "Pico CSS". PHP has been around for ages, is backwards-compatible in most cases and my (simple) code does not have any external dependencies.

I used to have my sites in git and then some build & deploy process (docker images). Lately I switched to Resilio Sync (a commercial, decentralized sync protocol) which allows me to "just edit" the gmi files on my phone or on my laptops to publish content. Note to self: Evaluate if "syncthing" might be a good open source alternative.

=> Christoph Lühr - Gemini-Site | Christoph Lühr - Web-Site | Pico CSS - Minimal CSS Framework for Semantic HTML | Resilio Sync | Syncthing

Gemtext Format

Basically, Gemtext allows only the following "Markup":

• Headlines (max 3 levels)
• Text paragraphs
• Lists with items (like this)
• Links (URLs) to arbitrary content
• Blockquotes
• Preformatted / ASCII Code text blocks

Sample:

# First Headline
a text paragraph ... and more text ...
## Second level headline
* list item 1
* list item 2
=> https://example.com Linktext
> blockquote
'''
ascii block
'''

IndieWeb

Closely related are ideas the IndieWeb movement is pushing: Free yourself from the big corporate platforms and (re-)start publishing your content on your own website. Does that mean losing all your connections on social media? Not if you got your POSSE! I follow this paradigm by pushing my local blog posts from to mastodon and my photo feed to pixelfed. This is easy with Atom feeds of the content and a local n8n workflow publishing to the fediverse.

=> POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere | My Pixelfeed photos | My Microblog