Cosmic Voyage Update

Thanks to a cosmic user, khuxkm, the Cosmic Voyage gemini server is now running directly off of the authored content. This is new, trust me.

Cosmic was originally built as a system on gopher and as such its content is primarily authored in text files designed to be served on that platform. This is one of the reasons we have hard-breaking preformatted lines.

Shortly after launch I was asked to add a web version of the site. I wrote a cron-job that ran through the gopher content and transformed it into HTML with some wrappers for styling. This is how things worked for the first two years. Eventually Gemini was established and I did the same thing for that platform. Voyagers would author the content which would immediately publish to gopher. Then a cron-job would fire every hour or so and completely rebuild the web and gemini versions. Oh, and RSS and Atom feeds too! It ... wasn't great.

A few months ago I scrapped the web script. It had become unreasonably complex and took serious time to compute. There was also a bit of downtime as the site rebuilt. I did some caching nonsense to patch it, but it was all just delaying the eventually rebuild. The web version is now a proxy that pulls content from the gopher folder and recreates the indexes and such on the fly. It's done in node and it works quite well.

> A quick aside: The web version of the site has a tiny bit of javascript in the header to allow for manual dark-mode. Not all systems support prefers-color-scheme, so this was a fix I added to help in the interim. Now that the site is dynamically built, however, I can remove that client-side code and implement the changes on the back-end. SCORE!

Tonight marks the change-over for Gemini. khuxkm wrote a python app that sits atop jetforce and does for gemini what my node app does for the web. We're now serving cosmic content in real-time for you geminauts.

In the days ahead please notify me if you encounter any issues. We ran through it pretty thoroughly and things were looking good, but there's always something that sneaks by.

> Oh, and RSS and Atom feeds are still updated hourly. If you're fetching more often than that, you can cool it. ;)

Originally Published 2021-10-07 at:

gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20211007-cosmic-voyage-update.gmi

If you have questions or thoughts to add please send me a link to your response.

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