Read this from git

2023-10-21

You can now read Laniakea offline through git, or download daily-updated Markdown summaries.

I got inspired by an article by Solderpunk to provide my blog articles as easily distributable offline copy through git. Solderpunks article goes conceptually further than I do with my implementation. Nonetheless this was a satisfying experiment.

You can now

have a offline copy of this website through git and update it whenever you are online

download Markdown summaries of all blog articles in one file and all tui cheatsheets in another

use your local git copy from 1. to generate the Markdown files from 2. yourself

How to do this

some context

Laniakea (this website) is generated by some commandline tools. This allows me to keep the content separate and “wrap” it in scaffolding that make up headers, footers and such.

If you only want to read my articles offline, this doesn't matter to you. If you want to build a local gemini page to browse offline, you'll need Linux, cygwin or something comparable since I'm using awk, sed and such to get the job done.

get your offline git copy

    git clone git://rodoste.de/laniakea.git

After this you'll find the raw content of my journal in ./journal and the TUI cheatsheets in ./tui.

download pre-generated Markdown files

A chronological archive of all journal entries can be downloaded through gemini:

=> Laniakea Journal

The same goes for my TUI cheatsheets:

=> Laniakea TUI cheatsheets

Both files are markdown-ish. I've taken care to convert gemini links to markdown links. Links to other articles won't work though. Some other peculiarities in gemini script aren't converted to perfectly correct markdown.

The resulting files read fine through a plain-text editor and markdown renderers such as glow seem to have no problem either. So this is good enough.

generate the Markdown summaries from your local git copy

If you have cloned my git repository you can generate the Markdown archives yourself:

    ./build offline

The .md files will be written to ./static/md

conclusion

The idea initially outlined by Solderpunk resonates quite strongly with me. It adds a layer of resilience to online content. In the year that I'm part of gemini space, many of the more interesting articles have already vanished, or changed URLs so I don't find them anymore.

Having the option to clone a git repository solves the link-rot issue almost entirely. Gemini pages are uniquely qualified for this (along with gopher pages) since they are human readable and largely non-interactive. They are text files, essentially.

As such, cloning an entire repository just to read a few articles isn't unreasonable. Text files are small. Even blogs of much more productive writers than myself will hardly ever exceed a few megabyte in size after years of frantic writing.

Interestingly I was hesitant to implement this though. Are my ramblings really relevant enough to offer them as archives and as offline copies? Probably not. What made me decide to go ahead with it is that it doesn't matter.

I'm not putting myself on a pedestal. I don't think my writings are specially important. Maybe this is useful to someone. Laniakea has always been in a git repository, all I've done is provide read-only access and add the Markdown archive generation.