A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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This is a simple toolchain that allows you to focus on writing your website instead of getting distracted with HTML formatting.
It works by taking in a gemtext file and converting it into an HTML file.
Gemtext:
HTML:
Code can be found here on the public Git:
Doesn't Pandoc do the same thing as this?
I'm not a gemini user, but this seems like a nice tool!
I just came to share this blog post, written by the developer of curl about their opinion on gemini, for anyone interested :D
(PS: thank you for using codeberg instead of centralized alternatives!)
Thanks for sharing! It was a good read. They have good points for security and clarity revisions.
A lot of Gemini spec choices were made to dissuade feature creep. Youre probably never going to do banking through Gemini but its also pretty much gaurenteed you'll never need adblock either.
Gemini is appealing from the perspective of novice self hosters. Its simple enough that most people can set up a simple server and publish on their site within a few hours. Its minimality enforces maximizing the most reading content for least bits used. 95% of modern webpages isnt even for reading or reference its all back end trackers and scripts and fancy CSS. Newswaffle shows just how bad it is.
When I read through a gemtext capsule I get the impression I'm looking at something that was distilled into its most essential. No popups no adds no inline images or tracking scripts or complex page layouts. My computer connects to the server, I get back a page of text or an image of a zip file. Once and done.
Nice! Gemtext and gemini in general is a really cool playground. I also learnt awk to do my gem2web script and all this lead me to web hosting. Very nice technology.
Similar story here! A couple years ago learning about Gemini/gopher/smallnet from mentaloutlaw videos. So I joined a public access Unix server (first SDF later tilde.team) and learned how to write my own capsule site for a few years. Learned some basic .CGI bin and awk processing to create a gemtext to epub converter that made small ebooks of daily post in atom feed. It was like training wheels really helped prepare me for the transition to full self hosting capsule and website
If you want to discover some even more obscure UNIX, SDF is having its Plan9 boot camp this Sunday. You can register now to get an access to their public access Plan9 machine at sdf.org/plan9
Nice! Writing a similar converter was my first step when I set up my parallel site-capsule.
Love gemtext, it's so simple yet pragmatic. (And there is just one version of it, unlike Markdown)