Now available on Gemini

I've always been a big fan simple websites, which don't bombard you with lots of visual noise, and don't bombard your computer with computationally expensive requests, annoying pop-ups, ads, unneeded cookies, tracking scripts, and other bloat. But even though I make simple websites, modern web browsers are such complicated beasts that in order to view them, you still rely on bloated and user-hostile software.

When I found out about the Gemini web protocol, it felt a bit like finding home. Something that just makes sense. Gemini websites are composed in a format that's simpler than Markdown, and a Gemini browser renders those directly, without having to translate them into HTML. Therefore all Gemini websites are forced to be simple, and since the protocol is designed to be non-extensible, the servers and browsers remain simple as well. This takes power away from big institutions and back to the people. One of Gemini's design goals actually was that a single developer should be able to program a comfortable Gemini browser in a single weekend. Yet, Gemini is very functional, and with only a few exceptions (I wish it had nested lists, inline links, and maybe tables), it offers everything I'd like in my websites.

So I reconfigured hugo, the static HTML generator of this website, to produce output files in the Gemini markup format as well, as described in this blog post by Sylvain Durand (thanks to vifon for the link in the first place!)

The final result can be found here:

gemini://rawtext.club/~hut

If you don't have a Gemini browser, this is what it currently looks like:

Instead of sparkling animated CSS art, it's just plebeian static ASCII art, but that's ok too :). Not all pages are implemented yet, but I'll gradually add them over time. Future pages and blog posts will also be designed primarily for Gemini.

Now I got the urge to do the same to the home page of PsyLink, since there too, most of the content is designed in a way that would be suitable for integration to Gemini. But that sounds like a huge misallocation of resources :)