Journal Update 019

What’s New

• Mirrored this journal on archive.org. The archive.org link can be found on the about page. Since I don’t have immediate, direct control over this mirror, it’s non-trivial for an adversary to remove the archive.org mirror even if I’m compromised.
• Rewrote nicksphere-gmi to separate presentation from business logic. There are still efficiency improvements to be made, but the code is already much cleaner and more maintainable. It’s now possible to easily make the website look very different from the capsule. This may be desirable since Gemini is more limited.
• Added back the read time for entries. How much time an entry takes to read could be an important factor in deciding to read it or not. Also I want this journal to be respectful of the reader’s time and attention.
• Limited the atom feed to 20 entries. It does not need to contain every entry.
• Replaced the commit-signatures repository with git-signify. Git-signify is a hack which embeds Signify signatures into Git repositories. It’s better to have the signature information embedded directly into the repository itself so it’s more self-contained.

If all you want to do is verify commits, you don’t need git-signify. You can run the commands below instead. With Git and Signify installed, run:

git cat-file -p <commit-hash> | sed -n '/-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----/,/-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----/p' | sed '1d;$d' | sed 's/ //' > /tmp/sig
git cat-file -p <commit-hash> | sed '/-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----/,/-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----/d' | signify -V -p <signify-public-key> -m - -x /tmp/sig

Future Plans

• Document nicksphere-gmi. Unlike previous versions, the current nicksphere-gmi repository is a proper static capsule/website generator. It therefore makes sense to document it for others.
• Make a simpler demo capsule/website for potential nicksphere-gmi users.
• Remove the promoted page. I think it would be best to eliminate the promoted page over time, making an entry for each item on the promoted page. I would rather explain in proper context what it is about these people/organizations/etc that I support instead of just listing them with no explanation.
• Support multithreading for nicksphere-gmi.
• Add a 404 page to this journal.