Capsules update - April 2025

Posted on 2025-04-04

Categories: gemini

Tags: review

TLDR;

I migrated all my capsules at home, my blog is now exported better than before, I have plans for doing more here, being back on gemini feels great :-).

Introduction

I finally did it! 1 year and 2 days after my last published article on my gemlog, not only I’m posting here again, but I also managed to bring my blog back to gemini in a better shape than before, while migrating it and my other capsules to their “new” server. It isn’t new per say, it is just my capsules new home, selfhosted at home with almost all my services. It was, until now, hosted in a digital ocean droplet (with my GoToSocial fediverse server, that needs to be moved as well so that I can finally delete that droplet).

Anyway, here is (more or less) quick gemlog to highlight the changes.

This capsule

Blog

Most effort during this migration were on improving how my blog posts were displayed within my gemini capsule. Before that migration, the textual content was there in gemtext, but everything else was broken (internal links, images, …).

Some work later, I managed to export my blog with working internal links and images! All of that automated in my over engineered deployment workflow. You can read more about the export (and conversion) process on my blog. Big thanks to the great lowdown tool that did most of the heavy lifting.

Also notes that to fix internal links, blog posts will now have the same path as on my blog, meaning something like “/<year>/month/day/content-title.gmi” instead of links starting with “/blog/…” before. It means that old links now broken… Sorry about that, but it made the full process so much easier for me to match URI on both protocol. The address of the blog atom feed is still the same though.

There are still some issues though, which are low priority in my mind. I may fix those later, but that isn’t high in my todolist:

• Internal links to tags, categories or series pages
• Internal links to dedicated pages (eg: about, /uses, …)

Those pages are not exported to this capsule at this stage. I believe anchor links are broken too, but didn’t check.

If you find any issues, please let me now. And check the web version if you want to see everything working outside of just blog posts :).

If I recall correctly, Antenna requires to push something to indicates that a new post is available on a feed? If that’s the case, I need to add something at the end of my deployment workflow, both for the blog articles but also for the gemlog ones.

Gemlog

Nothing much happened there. The gemlog is still there and working, it was just waiting for new article to be written, like this one :).

As said above, I may to check if Antenna still requires to be “alerted” when a new post is available and add that to my deployment workflow. For this specific post though, I’ll do it manually.

Tinylog

Nothing yet on that front. I just copy/pasted the old file. But I do plan to get back to it.

My final goal would be to have “source of truth” for micro blogging, that would then be used in my tinylog, a new content type on my blog (eg: “notes” or “quick post”) and my Fediverse instance. In the complete POSSE philosophy… That still need a bit of thinking, but that would mean writing once and publishing on all micro blogs, including my website.

Being able to also do it from my phone (like true micro blogging) is where I still need some “brain juice” to be made, even though I do have some more or less complex ideas already.

Anyway, more on that later, as I’ve seen some movement in the tinylog community (read below).

Deployment process

I’m going to write on my blog the missing final part of my “unncessary complex deployment workflow” series of post that has been waiting for the gemini related post. If interested, you can read the previous part in the meantime: Unnecessary Complex Deployment Workflow: Context and Ideas Unnecessary Complex Deployment Workflow: Blog Deployment

Discogem

Discogem has been migrated as well. But I also decided to reset it and “forget” about all previously shared links. The atom feed URL should still be same, so feed reader, aggregators and Cosmos should still pick up new links.

Since its first day (12th of December 2022), more than 2 years and 3 months ago, more than 3490 capsules have been shared in those daily posts. And it has finally catch up with Lupa database and for some time now the list of links per day has been below 5 because of this (as it doesn’t use the same link twice and Lupa only list capsule active in the last 31 days).

I’m not deleting old posts though, I have migrated them as is. So if you fancy finding new links but already have seen the daily post, you can always go back in time and click around and randomly click on capsules to look at.

But today is the official start of the 2nd round of Discogem :)

Tinylog aggregator

The tinylog aggregator has also been migrated, but without any changes at this stage.

I’m happy to see that some tinylogs are still active. -fab- has a page listing all tinylogs available, and I’m going to use this in the near future to update the aggregator with them.

I also saw that Sandra sent some patches earlier today for GTL. I need to look at them though as I just saw it was related to the date format. If I recall correctly, this was a painful subject at the start of the RFC definition, maybe we need to make some backward incompatible changess to just use the gemini validated format (like in gemfeed)? At this stage many format are usable, at least in GTL.

I also have some longer term idea to help people embrace tinylogs more, but I’m not going to expend on that yet because it is too soon and would require me to spend some time coding new stuff, which I don’t know yet if I’ll have/take the time to do it. But I think there are still untapped potential in tinylogs!

Houston

No change at all here, the houston capsule has simply been migrated here.

French Planet Gemini

I’ve been “maintaining” (well, put in place and let it run for a year) an aggregator of French speaking capsules for some time now. It is ironic as, even though I’m French, my capsule being in English, I do not participate to that aggregator. But I know some users like it so I migrated it too.

I also decided to change the previous domain to a new planet-gemini.fr domain for no real reason except it reminded me of old planet style website that I liked a lot “back in the days”.

I also created a dedicated directory page on that same capsule to list all known French speaking capsules, including the one which do not provide an atom/rss/gemfeed feed and thus can not participate to the aggregated page. But at least we have a place to find them. If you have a french capsule but don’t know how to participate to the aggregator, I also wrote a simplified explanation of gemfeed in French to help you set it up.

So if you have a French speaking capsule (either fully or partially), feel free to reach out to me to add it to the directory and / or the aggregator.

I also created a capsule just for announcement regarding this planet, just because I didn’t want to mix French content here. So that capsule is now also used in the aggregator. You can either follow it directly to see any announcement related to this service or just keep watching the aggregator page where news will appear like other posts from other French speaking geminauts.

Maybe someone with BBS access (I do not have access, see next paragraph) could drop that link in the French subspace ?

Other Gemini related news

Since my data loss last year, I also lost my personal certificates to participate to BBS, Station and others. For now, I haven’t recreated an account there for 2 reasons: 1/ I’m still tip toeing back in the gemini world and 2/ I can’t see myself having another username than bacardi55, so creating a new account with another username would make me sad.

We’ll see if I change this at some point.

Conclusion

It’s great being back in the gemini space! Now I need to write more on this gemlog, but I’m happy that my blog, while not a truly first class citizen, is now in a good shape here, so at least writing there will still keep my capsule alive!

I also have other ideas related to the gemini protocol, some related to tinylogs, some others. As usual, the real constraint is the available time, so I’m not promising anything, but I’d love to see some changes.