Gemini for my blog

Motivation

My current approach for feeding my blog with content is rather simple. All of the pages are handwritten in plain HTML. Even it is doable, it is also a tedious task which stops me sometimes even to start writing. To lower the barrier and get into a continuous writing habit, I was thinking of a super simple markup language that covers my regular formatting demands (ie. lists, headlines, quotes and links). After some search I stumbled upon wikiwiki, mdoc, gopher and finally gemini. Where the last one seems to make a good fit between markup elements and maintenance on the long run.

What is Gemini and Gemtext

In summary for my writing efforts I would see the following benefits.

• Separation of content from representation
• Line-based formatting style like mdoc (ie. no inline styling)
• Simple outline with no special needs for editor (ie. use your mail app)
• It works by checking the first character of a line (even awk can be used)
• ... awk can be used (ie. fits perfectly in my tooling)

How to use it

After getting the awk script from datenbrei.de, I adapted it to my needs and changed how the back ticks get interpreted. I also removed the general HTML part in BEGIN because I'm using another approach to generate the final HTML file.

Integrating the script in my Makefile was as easy as adding a target with

index.html: index.gmi
        ./gmi2html index.gmi > $@

The rest of the Makefile was more or less untouched. And here we go, using gemtext in my blog from now an feels like lowering the barrier for producing content. I'm currently also thinking to get an ssh server up and running to use any device (ie. table, smart phone, computer) in our household where a text terminal can be executed on, which allows to blog independently from any special device.

References