Dear fellow tilde.club users,
I think it's great to have a space where all of us can put up some
stuff. Discoverability of the stuff put up by others, however, could
arguably be improved (see, for instance [1]). Especially in the domain
of gemini capsules, where we don't yet have tools like the list of
recently updated pages[2] or the tilde.club gallery[3]. At least to me,
the alphabetically sorted list of user capsules that is hosted at the
root of gemini://tilde.club/ is a seemingly impenetrable wall of text
that doesn't exactly put me in the mood of digging in.
To address this issue, I have started to experiment with a new index
layout that I just put up as part my own gemini capsule (see [4]). This
new layout keeps the alphabetically sorted list of gemini users, but
relegates it to a subpage that is only linked at the bottom of the main
index page. It also sports a second list of all users that is sorted by
the date their gemini capsule was last modified. The main entry point,
however, and the one that is highly visible on the redesigned index page,
is an aggregated gemlog for all tilde.club users. This aggregated gemlog
is by no means perfect and it is surely still missing a lot of interesting
content that either doesn't follow the gemlog formatting convention or
that is linked from gemlog pages I didn't discover yet. Still, and even
though the implementation is a terribly hackish abuse of sed and grep,
the aggregated gemlog is indeed somewhat functional. And it has already
helped me discover some interesting capsules.
In short, I think the redesigned page offers a nice way to get a first
impression of the neighbourhood, so to speak, and at least I myself like
it quite a bit better than the current main index. Also, if possible, I
would love to see the new design – or an adaption thereof – adopted
as the actual main index of gemini://tilde.club/. Using the new design
should be as simple as moving (or copying, for that matter) the contents
of /home/seifferth/public_gemini/sandbox/main-index/ over to /var/gemini/.
So here's my question: Do you guys agree that the new design offers a
better entry point than the current one? And if so, would someone with
root access be willing to actually copy the files over to the server's
gemini root directory? I'm looking forward to your feedback.
Have a nice day
Frank
[1]: gemini://tilde.club/~valvin/2022/09/13/scrapping-public-gemini/
[2]: https://tilde.club/tilde.24h.php
[3]: https://tilde.club/~tweska/gallery
[4]: gemini://tilde.club/~seifferth/sandbox/main-index/
