Moving blog from jekyll to gemini-based markup files

date: 2021-02-21 22:47

I have always liked simplicity and minimalism in web design.

All these modern web sites with lot of visual effects and javascript are foreign to me.

That is why I used so simple jekyll theme.

Some days ago I found interesting protocol called "gemini" on the internet, which mission is to rollback to origins of the web("The web, stripped right back to it's essence").

Gemini web page

The main features of the gemini protocol are:

TLS encryption
Line-orienting
Simplicity

The most interesting part for me is gemini's markup language, which is like html for http protocol.

It is very simple and readable. It is also line-oriented, which means that every logic part of the markup should take only one line.

Lets look at the elements of the gemini markup:

Text (just text)
Headings ("# Heading, ## Heading, ### Heading)
Lists (" * List element")
Links ("=> url", "=> url User-friendly alias")
Preformatted text ("starts with ```, like in markdown)

There is an example of gemini markup:

# My personal blog

Hi there, this is my web site. Few links:

=> https://ychbn.com/ Main address
=> https://anotherurl.com

And I think my blog is cool because:

* It's simple
* It loads fast
* It's my personal page, not facebook page

Yes, gemini does not support images directly(in sense that it does not provide separate sentence for image inlining), but it supports links, which can point to any resource(another gemini page, image, html page etc.).

There are things where I disagree with gemini author(s). The main thing is necessity of a new protocol.

I think the main problem with modern web is javascript and html, not the http protocol itself.

Less featured and more simple markup language can fix all problems we have - javascript high usage, complexity of web pages, reduction of sense.

And we have wide choise there - markdown, asciidoc, restructured text, org-mode - all of these languages are very popular and they have only semantic elements, not behavioral. Why I think they are not a good choise? Well, despite they are simpler than html, they still too complex.

In this sense gemini is the winner - only plain text can be simpler. So, I desided to use gemini markup for my blog. What it means:

All html pages are generated from gemini files. Maybe later I will refuse using of html, but for start I need it.
All gemini files can be viewed via http with client I created. The client is very simple, you can check it out(link will be at the end of this post). Also, gemini files can be viewed directly from browser, only it can not handle links and perform any formatting, but gemini markup is very readable, so it's not a problem.

Few words about converting the site from Jekyll. I converted all markdown files to gemini files by hands. I also created a simple static site generator so that the blog has only one sourcebase, not a mess of markdown and gemini files.

For image including, they should be added as links to images. Also they will not inlined into page with <img> tag, but presented as links, so user should click to link to view image.

P.S.

Of course, gemini is not a silver bullet. There are plenty of cases, where gemini is useless - sites where multimedia and it's behaviour is the content (games, web apps, designers portfolio sites etc).

Links

Client for viewing gemini files over http

Index page for gemini-version of this blog(which can be viewed via gemini_http):

Index

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