This page permanently redirects to gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/adiabatic/about/.
When I started this capsule in late 2020, I thought to myself “How can I make it so the work of writing for the internet is as pleasant as possible? How can I keep the friction of writing as low as possible?”
I settled on having no build step for the site itself, like I would with Hugo (a popular and very good static-site generator). I would just write, and then reupload everything when I wanted to publish or update something.
Of course, if there’s no build step, then I’d have to do things that build steps do or duck the need somehow:
The words/ directory hierarchy in this capsule uses the top two options (mostly the bottom/middle), whereas Scrawlspace goes for the latter option (helped along by a doubly-linked list between each year’s page).
I dislike writing raw JSON, so I introduced a build step to turn YAML into JSON. This got me the JSON Feed that this site offers. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a small Python program to turn the JSON feed into an Atom feed, which is actually supported by most Gemini-aware feed consumers.
In August of 2024 this capsule got rsync support, which saves loads of time not uploading things that have already been uploaded. While this isn’t a huge issue for an all-text site, uploading tens or hundreds of megabytes of images indiscriminately would start to grate.
After nearly four years of mostly just speaking calmly into the void, I’m sometimes surprised I still post. And yet, I do, and I like doing so. It scratches an itch I didn’t know I had.
This capsule has been edited with a number of text editors, roughly sorted by how much they’ve been used to edit the capsule:
=> Visual Studio Code | BBEdit | Helix | Vim | Working Copy | Amp | Micro
This site happily uses WebP, one of the finest semi-popular lossless image-compression codecs available today. By using WebP instead of PNG, this site shaves a whole 34 bytes (halving the file size!) off of the tracking pixel used on all pages here.
Speaking of the tracking pixel, its cheery, transparent self-introduction is derived from the finest e-mail .signature viruses from the late 90s.
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=> Home
=> Hi! I’m a one-pixel invisible tracking image! View me to let my webmaster know you’ve scrolled through the entire page! This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini; charset=UTF-8; lang=en-US
