I am still very new to Gopher, so when I heard about Gemini like a few days
after starting to have my Gopherhole, I thought that "oh, one more thing to
learn but it can wait".
What I saw online was that, it was created to combine the simplicity of Gopher
protocol and modern security. I actually don't care about security of my
Gopherhole...not saying that I don't care about security, but security has no
value when it comes to something that is supposed to be publicly accessible. I
will be worried if the mechanism allows someone to exploit the system and do
something that they aren't supposed to do. I don't worry when someone just
wants to have a look at my daily head banging moments, make a laugh and leave.
But when I noticed that in the Gopherspace, some holes were just a simple list
of files and I always had to go into those files to read the "phlogs". It took
me a while to figure out, oh, they were actually Gemini, not holes nor pages
but capsules.
Not a complaint because no one should be obligated to please anyone when they
are not doing something for rewards. Simple give and take, though people will
use it to judge...Human nature. Anyways, good thing is now whenever I see some
Gopherholes that don't make much sense, I will in my Lynx, press on Ctrl+G,
add "index.gmi" at the back and tada, it's a Gemini capsule.
Out of curiosity I made an index.gmi I can't remember how long ago. Basically
it was just a copy of my Gophermap with Gemini syntax. One thing I did like
was that amfora's UI is beautiful, much prettier than Lynx. It also formats
the passages neatly so that if I want to, I don't need to keep just 80 chars
in a row.
That said, I didn't make full use of Gemini, not even Gopher I think. I am
just adding plain text contents in both while they can do more. But whenever I
add a new phlog, I have to update 2 Gophermaps and 2 *.gmi...I know that I
should just script it but I am just too lazy to do that. And I believe Gemlogs
deserve to have prettier formatting using those "#"s, not in pure plain text
like I did!
Yesterday, I was at the brink of taking out again my Cat B35. I told myself
"Okay, if I am going to use the B35 again, I want to read phlogs on it". So I
looked into how I can make it work programmatically. I was planning to write
it in C, compile it into asm.js (KaiOS 2.5 supports only this but not wasm),
and be happy. I hit the very first hurdle that I was trained to forget - the
domain name! I have to resolve the domain name to connect to an IP!
After some search, getaddrinfo(3) seems to be the best take, but if I have to
compile it for Linux (KaiOS is Android-based) I am not sure whether I can.
Again to cross check I quickly wrote a TCP client in Go and it was just...it
worked like a charm when I spent merely a minute...It is always surprising to
experience how Go's standard libraries made network, web things super easy. At
work I use it to cope with JSON as it saves huge amount of time.
I then thought about using cURL. It also worked and is much easier, probably
would save me some troubles. But in the end, later in the day, I eased my
urge to go back to the "dumbphone" so this app may not get written very soon.
But anyway, from the experiments I really really love how simple Gopher is -
you send a blank, homepage request to the server, then it replies with a menu
and some texts. You tell the server the next page you want to go to, and it
serves you the next page. Exactly like the old web when there was no AJAX, you
just go to one web page, click on a hyperlink to browse another web page.
I didn't look into Gemini. I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that it may be
a bit more complicated than Gopher. And I think I just got enough that I
wanted to know about Gemini's usage, so I am happy with not having a capsule
but stay underground in a hole.
