Tiny tiny steps toward being a useful gemini capsule

Yesterday, I was looking into castor and the theme was very bright and white by default. I then discovered it was a GTK theme, and then went on the hunt and found a nord style theme for GTK3, which is fantastic!

[http] the github page for the theme

a screenshot of my desktop with castor in the nord theme

[http] a screenshot of my desktop with castor in the nord theme (over HTTP)

This makes the desktop reading experience of gemini content really nice, and comfortable for my eyes. I'm looking forward to being able to use castor more, as bombadillo still seems to fail on some hosts due to certificate issues. Which is okay, as now I have an alternative that works for me for when I'm not in full terminal mode. I'm still on the hunt for a terminal reader that will consume fewer resources than the equivalent GUI readers, but I'm okay for now. (An idea for a future project perhaps)

I still find myself reaching out to http services frequently though, most of my reading is done in firefox at present, although hopefully as I get more used to navigating the various service mirrors on the gemini network then I can move more and more to gemini only. What I'd really like would be a way of taking an HTML page and pulling out the main content, and serving it over gemini. Then when I find something on (for example) lobste.rs that I want to read, from the gemini mirror, then I can open the page directly in gemini and not have to switch back and forth between browsers for gemini content vs http content. This can obviously be solved by using an http browser with an extension, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. It's solved in bombadillo's case by using lynx to open http links, which is a useful compromise on the terminal reading side, but not so useful for castor or other graphical clients.

lobste.rs mirrored to the gemini network

[http] A qutebrowser userscript that allows viewing Gemini pages. The pages are converted to Markdown by the script, then to HTML using Pandoc and then displayed in qutebrowser

Castor is still missing in quite a few areas, but that's to be expected in a pre-release bit of software. Most of my wishes are already on the roadmap, with the only one not mentioned being "find in page". I'm very much looking forward to how it's progressing in the near future.

[http] Castor project's roadmap

Something else I did recently was submit my gemlog capsule to gus.guru's known feeds page, which was exciting! I also emailed solderpunk about being included in the capcom feeds list, and I discovered that capcom doesn't support RSS feeds, only ATOM feeds, so I spent a bit of time upgrading to ~nytpu's latest version of gemlog.sh, which publishes this very log, and recently changed from pushing rss feeds to pushing atom feeds, and I have since updated solderpunk about being included in capcom now that I have an ATOM feeds instead of RSS.

gus.guru's known-feeds page

central instance of capcom

[http] nytpu's gemlog.sh page on tildegit

There remains a few bits of work to be done I think, not mentioned so far, one of which is CGI scripts and figuring out how they work, so as to add some of my own "interactivity" to my capsule. Some of the various things I need to figure out:

What gemini server is running on tilde.club

Where can I add my own CGI scripts to run on my capsule on tilde.club

What can I make CGI scripts do that might be fun or useful

What restrictions are there on what I can make CGI scripts do, either generally, or within tilde.club

This evening will hopefully be answering those questions.

~lewiscowper