Hi Frank and all

Please excuse my oblivion, but how can I access the gemini link? Do I need a special application for it?

Many thanks, Leo

[1]: https://tilde.club/~halloleo/

December 8, 2023 at 12:32 AM, "Frank Seifferth" seifferth@tilde.club wrote:

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

On 14 Dec 2023, at 3:56, Frank Seifferth wrote:

Hi Leo,

yes, you do indeed need a special application for accessing the gemini links. There are quite a few options available, ranging from command line clients to fully-fledged graphical ones.[1] As for the command line clients, at least two are installed on tilde.club: bollux and amfora. So the simplest option might be to just ssh into tilde.club and then invoke

amfora gemini://tilde.club/

or alternatively

bollux gemini://tilde.club/

Since these clients are primarily gemini clients (although bollux also includes gopher support), you can even leave out the scheme and just invoke

amfora tilde.club

Also note that, since ~deepend already copied the updated version over to the server root (thanks ~deepend!) I replaced the version beneath my home directory with a redirect. To have a look at the redesigned index page I mentioned in my previous email, simply refer to gemini://tilde.club/ as proposed above; or, if you want to have a look at the actual files, take a look at /var/gemini/ on the tilde.club filesystem.

Best

Frank

PS: For a more technical and less practical introduction to gemini, you might also want to have a look at either gemini://geminiprotocol.net/ or https://geminiprotocol.net/.

Frank,

I just want to commend you on your email formatting. Your obvious forethought makes reading plain text a joy. Color me inspired!

:chef's kiss:

-- **Eric Beavers**

Any spelling or grammatical errors found in the above post are deliberate and included to boost the self‑esteem of those who spot them.

Hello, So everyone knows I will be pushing those changes to Github tonight. Just been a bit busy the last few days :)

Thanks!

On Dec 18, 2023, at 1:21 AM, Frank Seifferth seifferth@tilde.club wrote:

Hi everyone,

~jmjl just raised a question on IRC about the licensing of the redesigned gemini index and whether he was allowed to copy it. Since I was somewhat careless about this part, let me just clarify this for anyone who might be interested in copying or adapting the scripts. The latest version of the index page currently lives at /var/gemini on tilde.club. There's also a repo at https://github.com/tildeclub/geminipage, but that repo doesn't contain the latest commit yet, so just use the files on the tilde.club filesystem to get the latest version.

There's also a license in /var/gemini/LICENSE. It's MIT (Expat MIT, to be precise, according to ~xwindows). Please regard my contribution to be licensed under that license as well. Also note that some of the new files are based on the earlier version, which according to the git log was contributed by ~deepend in 2020. Also under MIT, I suppose. So yes, please reuse the files on your own tilde and wherever else you may find them useful.

Best

Frank

Hi everyone,

I see that ~winter updated his gemlog so that his posts now appear in the aggregated gemlog and, hence, also on the front page of tilde.club. This is, of course, a very good thing indeed and I am happy that the front page is becoming ever more lively. On the other hand, ~winter posts to his gemlog way more frequently than most other tilde.club users, which might lead to his posts eclipsing the activity of other users.

I would therefore like to propose a change to how the "recent gemlog posts" on the main entry page at gemini://tilde.club/ are populated. I. e., I would like to propose that posts be filtered by user and that only one post per user is shown on the entry page. This way, the six "recent gemlog posts" mentioned on the entry page would be guaranteed to be by six different users, which would more adequately reflect the multi-user nature of tilde.club. I would not adapt the "complete list of aggregated gemlog posts" for now, since this list is a lot less prominent than the "recent gemlog posts"; but I am open to discussion on this point if anyone feels the need.

As for the implementation, limiting the "recent gemlog posts" by user is actually pretty easy if one invokes the black magic of awk:

awk 'i[$NF]++ < 1'

'$NF' is the last (whitespace separated) field of the line, which, in case of the aggregated gemlog, happens to be the author's username preceded by an inconsequential tilde character and followed by an inconsequential closing parenthesis. 'i[$NF]++' returns the current value stored in dictionary 'i' for key '$NF' (the author's username) – which is zero if it has not been initialized – and then increments this value by one. '< 1' checks if this value is below one, so fails as soon as the value has been incremented once. Since there is no further command following this rule, it is implied that all lines for which the condition holds true should be printed.

If you want to see an example of what the updated entry page would look like, please have a look at

gemini://tilde.club/~seifferth/sandbox/main-index/

If anyone has any thoughts on this proposal, I would be very happy to hear them. I also want to thank ~winter who already informed me that he feels this proposal is fair.

If none of you are opposed to this proposal, I would also kindly ask ~deepend to commit the additional line to the git repo at /var/gemini/. It is only a one-line change:

$ diff /var/gemini/index.gmi \ ~seifferth/public_gemini/sandbox/main-index/index.gmi 17a18 > awk 'i[$NF]++ < 1' |

Best

Frank