Less Gemlog, More Capsule

2023-03-05 | #content | @Acidus

I've been spending a lot of time with older web content recently. Mainly I've been improving the capabilities of Stargate, my proxy that provides a Gemini-to-HTTP gateway, by reading web content via a Gemini client. I've also been using Marginalia's search engine to find interesting content, which has been tuned to return more early web content:

HtmlToGmi Changelog

Replacing Duckling with Stargate, a new Gemini-to-HTTP gateway

Using Marginalia Search via Gemini

I'm finding this older content refreshing and I think I know why: Much of the content is pre-blog, and doesn't follow that format. It's not an archive of posts written on such and such day. It's detailed content collected and grouped into areas about specific topics. Here is Melanie's Doom Corner, full of content about how Doom works, how to build custom levels for it, and how to compile it for different platforms. Or Brandon's running pages, where he talks about how he trains, runs, and handles injuries. You find a page or site or capsule with content you care about, and read it. You probably bookmark it. You come back to it.

In short, pre-blog content was grouped by topic and was expanded and updated organically, like a garden. Has it been changed? When? Who knows? Perhaps there was a "New" section, that would list when changes were made. Perhaps there was a "Last Updated" note in the footer. But more importantly: who cares? It didn't really matter. That wasn't the point. Do you need more firehoses of content in your life? The point was, here is Melanie's carefully collected information about Doom, or whatever.

Compare this with blogs and gemlogs. While some can be very topic specific, most aren't. They are often a chronological collection of content on a variety of diverse topics. Just take my gemlog as an example. There are posts on:

How and why I use build scripts on projects

Advice on securing web/capsule services

Random muses on converting parsing/HTML

Announcements of new services I have written

Best practices on receiving feedback on security issues

Book reviews

To find all the content I have written about parsing/converting HTML, you would first have to find and read many different posts in my gemlog scattered through time. Now, I do use tags in my posts, and if you search for tags, or use Kennedy's hashtag index, or if I added autogenerated categories pages to my capsule, you *could* see all my HTML or CGI content.

Kennedy Hashtag Index

So you can kind of force topic grouping on top of a chronological collection of various topics, but that's rather clumsy. It's still in the "daily journal"-style format. Each post has some boilerplate (e.g. intro, outro), focuses on a specific aspect, probably repeats information from other posts to some extent, etc.

So, I am left to really consider the benefits of publishing in a blog/gemlog format vs a organic, tended garden approach to content. I think the biggest benefits are:

1. Creates a well-defined timeline of published content.

2. from #1, it's super easy to see changes/new content, and when that occurred.

3. From #1 and #2, it comes easy to to have feeds/aggregators that only show the latest content.

There are of course other advantages, or types of writing which benefit from a chronology of content. Some of the great novels were written and published in serial form, the cliffhangers of their day. A public journal of life is another.

But that's not really what I'm interested in creating.

Most of what I want to create doesn't benefit from the properties of a gemlog. So why force it? I think a better fit is to treat my capsule as a garden: creating sections of content that I care about, collected and updated as I want, without a timeline. While I will still use a gemlog, I think the publishing / feed benefits of the format are best suited as a mechanism for me to announce things, instead of to publish things.

In short, at least for now: Less Gemlog, More Capsule.