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Improving Gemini by Posting IRC Logs (and Scrollback) as GemText

Video download link | md5sum 7f59fbaed69a0a29c3cce6b03dc87da8



Summary: Our adoption of Gemini and of GemText increases; with nearly 100,000 page requests in the first 3 days of December (over gemini://) it's clear that the growing potential of the protocol is realised, hence the rapid growth too; Gemini is great for self-hosting, which is in turn essential when publishing suppressed and controversial information (subject to censorship through blackmail and other 'creative' means)

TO THOSE who never heard about Gemini Protocol, let's quote this article, which says: "Gemini is an application-layer internet communication protocol for accessing remote documents, similarly to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Gopher. It is intended as a third alternative to those protocols. It comes with a special document format, commonly called "gemtext", that allows linking to other documents. Started by someone known as Solderpunk, the protocol is now being finalized collaboratively and has currently not been submitted to the IETF for standardization."



A fire alarmGemini isn't just a transmission protocol but also a "special document format", GemText. Ideally, almost everything in Gemini space should be in GemText, not text files (or gopher stuff). So over time we've been converting more and more material into proper hypertext with clickable links and all. First it was the index, then blog posts, then the wiki and so on. Next in the list we have IRC or IRC logs. The scrollback is now proper gemtext/gmi (after today's work) and next will be daily IRC logs. The archives, which go back to 2008...

The video above explains some technical ordeals I've been having due to external factors (like bad ISP and wiring issues), resulting in loss of time and even downtime (3 hours for Gemini; first time in months).

This coming week we have some decent articles to publish, so stay tuned.

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