I Retired My Atom Feed in Favor of My Gemfeed

The Atom feed always felt out-of-place, because it needs a script to be created. First I used a Python script¹, then a Bash script². When I created my capsule, I only started using it because it allowed using my full name as the gemlog title, which would not have looked good on my gemlog index page. And my full name postfixed with “’s Gemlog” is just too long for aggregators and on mobile alike. But after I introduced my tinylog, I consolidated the titles and used subtitles. I’m happy now.

Gemini Page Subscription Specification

The Python Script I Adapted From Solderpunk

The Bash Script I Adapted From Ricardo García Jiménez

Gemfeeds³ can easily be subscribed to with clients like Amfora (CTRL+x) or Lagrange (Bookmark > Subscribe to Page…). And if people need to have Atom feeds, they can utilizes converters like RocketFeed.

RocketFeed — A Simple Program to Convert Gemfeeds to Atom Feeds

What the voluntarily limited Atom feeds in Geminispace have over Gemfeeds:

Feed update date and time: Only helpful to avoid processing of already processed feeds. Gemfeeds cannot implement this, because pages might not have a consecutive order. I don’t think I gained much, especially because for me each deployment generated a new Atom feed to avoid user errors.

Feed author name: I didn’t need this, because my site is a single-author site and has my name in the URL.

Feed author email: Helpful, but not important. I didn’t use this.

Link to homepage of feed: Helpful, but not important. I never used this as a user.

Creator-selectable number of entries: Helpful, but not important. I didn’t use this, because my feed represents my gemlog index page, which has all the posts.

Entry dates with time: Helpful, if there are more than one post per day. I try to avoid it, because the gemlog index page cannot show times to be Gemfeed-compatible.

Only the last one would actually be relevant, but not for me. Now a `make` will just rsync my Gemini files to my server.

Life is good.

¹ The project-based python environment I needed for using `gemfeed.py` used 27 MiB of storage for 3 MiB of Gemini content and has to be maintained. The Bash script needs 5 KiB.

² Python is not fast compared to other programming languages, but it built the feed with 125 posts in 0.08 seconds. The Bash script takes 1.3 seconds, 16 times as long.

³ There was a vote on BBS almost a year ago on how to name Gemini page subscriptions:

Should we give Gemini page subscriptions a proper name?