Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Techrights Gemini Capsule Was Never a Mirror

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 27, 2026

Dog With Blind Eye

The system that runs Techrights is similar but not identical to the system that runs its sister site. The reasons are partly historical. In 2022 we were repeatedly having database-related issues; so, after fatigue (restoring from backups several times), we decided to roll out an alternative created from scratch, based on the needs and the specs at hand (we don't need all the bells and whistles of "modern" Content Management Systems, or CMS, which stands for "crappy management slopware"). By late summer (2022) we had a working prototype that more or less worked and a year later we deployed the same (but slightly more advanced) implementation in the Techrights Web site, in turn replacing the old Gemini system in one fell swoop. This left us with fragmentation for both sites, the "old" and the "new" (or "news"). But the Gemini pages, in GemText and Gemini Protocol, where never complete replications of anything at all; the conversions were lossy and automated. They were mostly unsupervised and old pages had no GemText versions at all (for example about 170,000 pages in the sister site were purely HTML with nothing in any protocol other than HTTP/S).

The aim was never for the sites to be replaced by capsules but rather to facilitate/cater for blind people - such as users who don't use mice or touchscreens - or folks who want to access content and don't mind the lack of formatting and images (which they cannot or do not wish to see anyway).

Techrights has long taken accessibility quite seriously and has a whole section in Daily Links devoted to accessibility; it also has a Morse and Semaphore version.


Image source: Dog With Blind Eye


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