Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2022

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• What I like and dislike about Gemini

  This is about the protocol and text format, not the community or content.

  What I’ve come to like and dislike about Gemini after two years isn’t necessarily what I thought I’d like. Some have stayed the same, some have changed.

  I like it enough that I read the Gemini version of sites that are bihosting.

• I tried Doom Emacs, but I switched back to (Neo)Vim

  As a long-lasting user of Vim (and NeoVim), I always wondered what GNU Emacs is really about, so I decided to try it. I didn't try vanilla GNU Emacs, but Doom Emacs. I chose Doom Emacs as it is a neat distribution of Emacs with Evil mode enabled by default. Evil mode allows Vi(m) key bindings (so to speak, it's emulating Vim within Emacs), and I am pretty sure I won't be ready to give up all the muscle memory I have built over more than a decade.

• A rabbit hole of webmentions

  How hard could it be?

  It's relatively straightforward, or so I thought until I started going down this particular rabbit hole yesterday [2]. The first stumbling block is sendind a webmention. The protocol itself isn't that tough—just send a `POST` to an endpoint with the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of my post, and the URL of the post I mentioned and that's pretty much it. But the issue I have is that I tend to link freely. This one paragraph post [3] has six links in it! When I exclude links back to my own blog, there are still three external links. Do I check each one? There are plenty of posts (like this one [4]) where sending a webmention isn't something I want to do. So I'm having a bit of analysis paralysis [5] on how exactly I want to handle this. For now, it's a manual process.

• First Release of the Gemroff Markup Language

  The second new program I've been working on for a while and finished this month, I'm announcing the release of the Gemroff markup language!

• GObject Introspection

  When possible, I like to defer technical decisions for as long as possible. For example, if you're using a standardized language & OS interfaces, you don't need to pick an actual compiler/interpreter and OS until quite late.

  For example, say I pick Common Lisp and UNIX. The eventual platform will probably be sbcl and Linux, but it doesn't have to be. Similarly, in CL CFFI is a pseudo-standard FFI that is portable to many compilers. But is there such a thing as an FFI that is portable to many languages?

• Toe 0.2 release

  Some of the recent changes to Agis had application to Toe as well, with minor changes. Toe now shuts down gracefully when receiving sigint, sigterm, etc. I've also done some general code cleanup and housekeeping.

• Agis 0.4 release

  I release version 0.4 of Agis this evening. This release adds a number of new features as well as greater stability. Agis has been serving this capsule over the Spartan protocol for the past six months.

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.