Put your capsule’s URL in your Gemtext pages

Elsewhere, I’ve said that you ought to save things you like that you’ve discovered in Geminispace as the post might disappear randomly.

However, if other people are saving your pages, your pages may not have much in them to help identify what capsule they were from.

The easiest, least obtrusive way to do this is this:

☞ Place a not-at-all-relative link to the home page of your capsule at the bottom of all of your pages. If you like, give it a label like “Home” or “🏠” or the like. ☜

For this capsule, that link is:

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/adiabatic/

It has the whole URL, and the protocol, too. A link like

or even

../../../

won’t mean anything to a file that’s saved on someone’s hard drive somewhere, dissociated from the rest of your capsule.

⁂

Objections and responses:

Any good Gemini client will already have a way to navigate to the capsule root!

Very true. However, a link like this at the bottom of the page also communicates that this is the end of the page (and the transmission didn’t end prematurely), so it’s not totally useless noise even for people who never save anything.

But what if I move my capsule and need to change all the links?

This should be easy to change all in one fell swoop if you have a text editor capable of doing project-wide find-and-replace. If your favorite text editor can’t do this easily, consider switching, if only for this task, to one that can.

For this capsule, I’d need to search for

=> gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/adiabatic/ Home

and replace it with something like

=> gemini://gemini.halfwaytomars.net/ Home

and make sure that I didn’t have any weird false positives, like if that exact text were in a code block (like it is now on this page).

If I wanted to be a little bit more robust to other ways of spacing stuff, I could change the regular expression to be:

=>\s+gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/adiabatic/\s+Home

In JavaScript (and probably all) regular expressions, \s means “any whitespace” (including spaces and tab characters) and + means “one or more”.

I recommend Visual Studio Code for this sort of mass search-and-replace because it will let you preview every single change it’s about to do, and, if one of them isn’t a change you want to make, let you throw that change out of the batch before all the changes are made.