schrockwell.com - Now simulcast to the Web and Geminispace!

May 3, 2024

It's a tradition observed by developers everywhere: the complete overhaul and redesign of the personal web site. Today, it's my turn.

This site is now published to the Web and to Gemini. It's the same content, the same formatting, the same silly side projects – now on the creaky old Web and the shiny new Geminispace.

I played around with Kirby CMS for a few weeks. It went okay. I like how Kirby starts as a barebones setup, and every additional feature is opt-in. It's endlessly customizable, the admin panel UI looks great, and the documentation is mostly complete.

But the whole thing felt really complex for a basic home page, I'm not super familiar with PHP, and the deployment story was kind of "meh". I really didn't like how schemas and content were inextricably coupled together in the same repo.

=> Kirby CMS

Plus, I wanted to put something "real" on Gemini. And I definitely did not want to maintain content in two places with two different formats.

=> Project Gemini

The solution ended up being the simplest in nearly every way. There's one folder of Gemtext content, and a build script that statically generates both the web site and the Gemini capsule.

The build script is just shy of 400 lines of Ruby, which is a testament to the simplicty of Gemtext. Honestly, once GitHub Copilot figured out what I was trying to do, it did most of the work.

generate.rb       <-- Build script
content/          <-- INPUT: Gemtext files, images, etc.
    about/
    posts/
    projects/
    index.gmi
_site/            <-- OUTPUT: Web site (HTML)
    index.html
    ...
_capsule/         <-- OUTPUT: Gemini capsule (Gemtext)
    index.gmi
    ...

The web site is built and hosted on Netlify, and the Gemini capsule gets rsync'ed to a Digital Ocean VPS running gemserv.

Now I can stop procrastinating and focus on the content.

There are still a few TODOs. A GitHub Action to deploy the Gemini capsule would be cool. And I would love to run the image assets through ImageMagick for resizing and sharpening. Should be easy enough to add.

=> Source code

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