Site Update 011
What’s New
I paused posts because I’ve been busy migrating my blog to [Gemini](Gemini specification):
- Migrate blog to Gemini because the web is cancer.
- New website! Even though the web is cancer, a web presence is still a necessity. I wrote a script that generates a Gemini capsule and website from my content files. I also wrote the CSS myself to mirror the look of the Amfora Gemini client for convergence.
- Register a new domain name! nicksphere.com. It’s a .com domain, more memorable and more meaningful than 0gitnick.xyz. 0gitnick.xyz will also work until it expires just to give readers time to bookmark the new domain.
- New Tor/I2P/Freenet links as well! The Tor v3 onion now contains “nick” instead of “0gitnick”. The I2P address is now “nicksphere.i2p”. The freenet link is now “/nicksphere” instead of “/0gitnick”.
- Gemfeed and web feed (Atom) are available with content summaries. Full content Atom feeds may be available again in the future, but don’t bank on it.
- Promoted content has returned! I added a disclaimer this time to make it clear what the promoted content is all about so that my previous reservations are lessened.
- I will no longer promote content with a post unless I have significant commentary to add. I don’t like posting others’ content in my own posts because then if you already view their content then you see it twice. It just wasn’t a good way of organizing promoted content, so I’m done doing that. Here’s how it will work going forward: For content I want to promote, I will use the promoted page. For content I want to commentate on, I will make a post about it.
- All tags and separate feeds are gone. I don’t feel like the tagging system was very valuable. I often didn’t know what to tag my posts or whether to create a new tag for them or remove a tag. Now I don’t have to think about it. I can get on with just doing what I like which is writing posts. As for you readers of my blog, I have doubts that anyone much uses the tags anyway. Reading the title and summary probably does more to help readers make a judgment if they want to read that post than tags. I would’ve had to reimplement them in my content management system and it didn’t seem worth the work.
Future Plans
- Write configuration files for CI pipelines so the Github and Gitlab site mirrors work again. Since I’m using a content management system I wrote myself, I also have to write the CI pipeline configuration for generating the site myself and I haven’t gotten to it yet.
Ignore what site update 10 says about the repos. It only makes sense to have 1 repo to maintain content on Gemini and the Web. The repo nicksphere-www is deprecated. It will no longer be used at all. The canonical repo for my content is now nicksphere-gmi. It contains generator scripts for Gemini and the web as well. It still needs work such as the CI pipelines, but it’s close enough to use for my capsule and my site now.
In post 10 I estimated it to take months to launch this Gemini capsule, but I’m clearly ahead of schedule. Also, I’ve learned there are existing content management systems for gemlogs that I could have used. They generate Atom feeds automatically, but I’ve already written my own that works well for my content, so I’ll just make changes to it if necessary instead of using someone else’s.