No ROOPHLOCH, and my October Gothic Just a general status update. I didn’t manage to do ROOPHLOCH this year. Partly, I was busy, but a bigger part is maybe just that I didn’t have anything new to do. Post from my phone, post from a modern but obsolete computer tethered to my phone, post in a park, post in a nature reserve. It just feels like I’ve done the easy levels, but the next level up is unreachable for me.
Weather and things I am, as usual for me and ROOPHLOCH, sneaking things in at the end of the month. One reason has been that it has been too damn hot here! It doesn’t normally start cooling down for autumn here until October, but this year it has been especially bad. Temperatures in the mid 80s F, with heat indices in the 90s. We’ve finally started to have cool evenings and mornings as of last week, and now after the equinox, I had been hoping the days would start being tolerable.
This list is necessarily incomplete, partly due to the complexity of
modern HTTP and HTML, but it hits the high points. If you think
there is something critical missing, please contact me by email.
Today’s the last day to submit entries to ROOPHLOCH, the outdoor, off-grid Gopher logging event. I’ve submitted one the last two years, but I’m going to skip it this year. My main reason is that I want to move my Gopher hole to mirror my Gemini capsule rather than my website, but I haven’t got around to making that conversion. If I were going to post ROOPHLOCH this year, I’d rather it be on Gopher and Gemini rather than Gopher and the WWW.
I’d like to announce a new website I’ve created, called Gemini Quickstart!. It’s a guide to getting started on Gemini for non-technical users with no experience with Gemini, Gopher, or other alternative internet protocols. It walks you through installing a Gemini client, finding things you’re interested in to read, and creating your own space in the Geminiverse.
If you’re reading this, and you’re not on Gemini yet, check it out!
Minor germinal update: link syntax So, the Gemini link syntax was finalized:
Link Syntax Finalized
The one place this affects Germinal is in the generation of directory indexes. Germinal’s directory indexing code has been updated accordingly.
I have also updated the links on my Gemini site.
Unless there are changes coming to the response header line format, this is probably the last Gemini change that actually affects Germinal. Pretty much everything else is client-side.
Is the gemini map format intended to be reflowed? One question that hasn’t been addressed in the Gemini speculative specification is whether the Gemini map file format text/gemini is intended to be reflowed. By reflowed, I mean mainly that the line-length of the file itself is not intended to be mapped exactly to the output device, which should instead lay out the text with appropriate line lengths. This is what HTML renderers do, and what MarkDown renderers do, usually by way of conversion to HTML.
Germinal is a server for the Gemini Protocol that I’ve been writing in Common Lisp during my lunches and some evenings.
It is named after the early 20th century Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper Germinal. I wanted to name it after an anarchist publication to convey the idea of people sharing information and ideas with each other, in contrast to the way the web is used to push advertising from corporations to people.
