Gemini native subscription feeds and link descriptions

> BeerW0lf | 2021-02-15

Past few days I’ve tried to subscribe to many interesting gemlogs. It’s been confusing, since some work well and others not so much. I’ve noticed that some gemloggers have not yet grasped the importance of proper time stamping on link descriptions. Depending on your gemini client, it might be important.

A proper gemlog time stamp

When you see a link to a gemlog with a time stamp, this is is not just some well established practice in gemini space, but a requirement for native gemini feeds to function properly:

> A feed's entry elements are derived from a subset of its link lines, if any are present.

>

> Each link line where the URL is followed by a label whose first 10 characters correspond to a date in ISO 8601 format (i.e. YYYY-MM-DD) represents a single entry. Link lines which do not meet this criteria are ignored.

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/companion/subscription.gmi

A proper link to a gemlog would be something like:

Wrong formatting or omitting the time stamp is a common oversight. Not many clients use subscription feeds at the moment, so users and authors might forget about the feature. In fact, I don’t think any mobile browser has a working subscription feature at the moment.

Musings on gemlog titles, authors and dates

I find, that it is a good practice to have an author’s name or handle on the gemlog page. A date on the page is also a good idea, even if the date is already present in the index link description. This gives the page more clarity. Its also good idea to have a link at the bottom to your capsules front page.

These identifying marks and dates on the page itself, help the random wanderer get orientated quickly, when stumbling on to your page from some feed aggregator or search function. The page could also be saved offline or converted to some other format. It migt be important to know what the source is.

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gemini://gemspace.observer/