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/