My website and blog is available via Gemini

Gemini is a neat piece of technology. The Gemini

=> Gemini

protocol somewhat comparable to HTTP and the Gemtext file format comparable to

HTML. But it's simple. Like so simple that writing a client or server is

actually doable.

All popular web browsers (Chromium and its skins - and Firefox) have their

roots in the 1990's and there hasn't been any new web browser becoming usable

in many years. Not because people haven't tried - I'm sure many people have -

but because the standards around the modern web are so gigantic that it's just

not feasable to develop a web browser from scratch.

The best (and only?) attempt I've seen is Ladybird,

=> Ladybird

which is "an ongoing project to build a truly independent web browser from

scratch". And I'm very happy to see this project continuing to get better, but

it's still far from a usable web browser for everything you want to do in life.

So, back to Gemini!

Earlier in 2024 I've installed a Gemini server on the same host which is

running Apache2 for serving my website/blog and after a few commands for setup

it was running.

Since my website content is written in Markdown and built using Hugo, it was

not a difficult exercise to add "Gemtext generation" to the build pipeline and

using a few regex replacements we can generate a version of the website that

mostly resembles Gemtext.

Of course, that generated version is definitely not perfect and sometimes some

Markdown-isms or HTML bits slip through, but for being essentially zero

maintenance it's pretty great. Manually polishing a separate Gemtext version

would be better of course but for now this version will do.

For viewing Gemini pages you can find clients for most platforms, notably I

like "Lagrange" on Linux and "Buran" on Android. Of course there's plenty other

clients as well, including clients for your terminal and everything else.

Hope you enjoy!

=> Image: Screenshot of my website in the Lagrange client