gemini://makeworld.space/gemlog/2020-12-20-amfora

140 days ago, I wrote a post responding to Solderpunk, who wrote about how CAPCOM was growing fast, and how he'd like to see other people start hosting their own instances. In my response, I thought that I had a different and possibly better solution.

> I think it's client-based aggregators -- where the aggregation is built into an existing Gemini client. This feature has actually been on Amfora's roadmap since the first commit, ~2 months ago, but Solderpunk's post has motivated me to bring this feature up in my task list.

> Crucially, I'd like to support not just Atom and RSS feeds, but also subscribing to page changes, which is how Spacewalk works. That way users could stay subscribed to updates on sites like gemlog.blue, or the homepage of their friends. Anytime the hash of the page changed, it would show up the same way a "new post" would. There could be a "Track Page" shortcut to acheive this.

> To my knowledge, Amfora would be the first & only client to implement this, but it shouldn't stay that way! I hope other client authors (and users) like this idea, and will implement it as well.

At the time, I mentioned how this idea had been planned since Amfora's inception, which is now over 6 months ago! Crazy to think it's been that long. Well, 140 days ago I made that post, fleshing out the idea, and the same day I made a GitHub issue so work could really begin. Today that work comes to fruition, because Amfora v1.7.0 is out! I'm very happy to see this release made, as I think the new Subscriptions feature is quite useful.

And just in time too! CAPCOM is now at 100 feeds, and Solderpunk will be rotating them monthly. As time passes, CAPCOM may no longer have the gemlogs you like, but will hopefully also introduce you to new ones. With the subscriptions feature, you can keep the ones you like inside your client.

But first, I'd like to correct my quote above. Amfora is not quite the first client to implement this, the great Lagrange client added support for Gemini Feeds in v0.11. The main difference is that Lagrange only supports Gemini Feeds, while Amfora has support for Atom, RSS, and JSON, as well as subscribing to regular pages, to be notified when they change.

I've been using the subscriptions feature for a few weeks now, subscribing to feeds from CAPCOM, and keeping track of pages I like. It's been a nice way to build my own slice of Gemini, and curate my interests. I hope everyone who tries it out feels the same.

This new release also brings something else: a wiki! Amfora is somewhat complex now, and so along with the help of Lokesh Krishna, a wiki has been written, documenting Amfora's features and how to use them. It is linked whenever you open a new tab in Amfora. The wiki is hosted through GitHub's Wiki feature, and I wrote a small Python script that will convert it into a nice format for Gemini.

So, I hope you will check out and enjoy the new release! You can download it and find out more on the releases page. And to client authors: try adding a subscription feature to your own client! You might just like it. 😜

Oh, I almost forgot to mention! This release also includes support for domain names with Unicode in them (IDNs). It will punycode the domain for you, and send that punycoded version to the server. It will accept both the punycode and the Unicode verison of the domain name in the certificate. This is basically the same as what Lagrange now does, except for allowing Unicode in the certificate. You can visit gémeaux.bortzmeyer.org to see all of this in action.

Amfora v1.7.0 released, with subscriptions!