gemini://going-flying.com/~mernisse/31.gmi

As I try to get myself back into something that resembles a routine after the holiday break I started to poke around at some things that have been needing attention. It seems that my microblog to gemini renderer has been broken for about a month. A quick fix and it seems to be functioning but that gave me an excuse to tweak the overall layout. Previously I rendered gemtext headings for the years and the months, leaving the individual entries as just simple paragraphs, however it seems more logical to expose individual entries so you can navigate the in-reply-to chain using your user-agent, assuming it has the ability to navigate headings (Lagrange does).

I admit I mostly ignored this capsule last year, writing only 6 posts. In reviewing the statistics I generate a few things popped out to me that I found interesting. It seems that robots.txt is completely useless as the #1 hit on my capsule seems to be crawlers trying to traverse the git repository interface (about 20k hits / month), while actual posts account for tens of hits per month (gemlog posts being about 50 / month and other pages like the generated stats pages are 20-30 / month). The gemlog atom feed is about 2 orders of magnitude more popular than the microblog feed. I don't know if this is indicative of actual use or if it is because of differences in crawler behaviors. The most common error code served by a long shot was 51, and other than the crawler screwing around in the git repository, they all appear to be a client mishandling relative links in the Thoughts microblog page trying to load attachments from / instead of /thoughts/. I guess poorly implemented clients are at least indicative of continued interest and experimentation in the Gemini protocol, so that's a good thing!

Anyway, as always, if something is overtly broken, useful, or interesting feel free to reach out. I still get a few messages a month of the silly VFD display so that is still running on my desk and does bring a smile to my face when I notice it lit up.

[01/02/2023 @10:30]: Moving onward to 2023