Dan Q
How did I never think of accessing Gemini (the protocol) on my Gemini (portable computer) before today?
Of course, I recently rehomed my Gemini so instead I had to access Gemini on my Cosmo (Gemini’s successor), which isn’t nearly as cool.1
1 Still pretty cool though. Reminds me of using Lynx on my Psion 5mx last millenium…
A particular joy of the Gemini and Spartan protocols – and the Markdown-like syntax of Gemtext – is their simplicity.
Even without a browser, you can usually use everyday command-line tools that you might have installed already to access relatively human-readable content.
Here are a few different command-line options that should show you a copy of this blog post (made available via CapsulePress, of course):
Gemini communicates over a TLS-encrypted channel (like HTTPS), so we need a to use a tool that speaks the language. Luckily: unless you’re on Windows you’ve probably got one installed already1.
This command takes the full gemini:// URL you’re looking for and the domain name it’s at. 1965 refers to the port number on which Gemini typically runs –
printf "gemini://danq.me/posts/gemini-without-a-browser\r\n" | \ openssl s_client -ign_eof -connect danq.me:1965
GnuTLS closes the connection when STDIN closes, so we use cat to keep it open. Note inclusion of --no-ca-verification to allow self-signed
certificates (optionally add --tofu for trust-on-first-use support, per the spec).
{ printf "gemini://danq.me/posts/gemini-without-a-browser\r\n"; cat -; } | \
gnutls-cli --no-ca-verification danq.me:1965
Netcat reimplementation Ncat makes Gemini requests easy:
printf "gemini://danq.me/posts/gemini-without-a-browser\r\n" | \ ncat --ssl danq.me 1965
Spartan is a little like “Gemini without TLS“, but it sports an even-more-lightweight request format which makes it especially easy to fudge requests2.
Note the use of cat to keep the connection open long enough to get a response, as we did for Gemini over GnuTLS.
{ printf "danq.me /posts/gemini-without-a-browser 0\r\n"; cat -; } | \
telnet danq.me 300
cURL supports the telnet protocol too, which means that it can be easily coerced into talking Spartan:
printf "danq.me /posts/gemini-without-a-browser 0\r\n" | \ curl telnet://danq.me:300
Because TLS support isn’t needed, this also works perfectly well with Netcat – just substitute nc/netcat or whatever your platform calls it in place of
ncat:
printf "danq.me /posts/gemini-without-a-browser 0\r\n" | \ ncat danq.me 300
I hope these examples are useful to somebody debugging their capsule, someday.
1 You can still install one on Windows, of course, it’s just less-likely that your operating system came with such a command-line tool built-in
2 Note that the domain and path are separated in a Spartan request and followed by the size of the request payload body: zero in all of my examples
For a while now, this site has been partially mirrored via the Gemini1 and Gopher protocols.2 Earlier this year I presented hacky versions of the tools I’d used to acieve this (and made people feel nostalgic).
Now I’ve added support for Spartan3 too and, seeing as the implementations shared functionality, I’ve combined all three – Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher – into a single package: CapsulePress.
CapsulePress is a Gemini/Spartan/Gopher to WordPress bridge. It lets you use WordPress as a CMS for any or all of those three non-Web protocols in addition to the Web.
For example, that means that this post is available on all of:
It’s also possible to write posts that selectively appear via different media: if I want to put something exclusively on my gemlog, I can, by assigning metadata that tells WordPress to suppress a post but still expose it to CapsulePress. Neat!
I’ve open-sourced the whole thing under a super-permissive license, so if you want your own WordPress blog to “feed” your Gemlog… now you can. With a few caveats:
Whether or not your WordPress blog makes the jump to Geminispace4, I hope you’ll came take a look at mine at one of the URLs linked above, and then continue to explore.
If you’re nostalgic for the interpersonal Internet – or just the idea of it, if you’re too young to remember it… you’ll find it there. (That Internet never actually went away, but it’s harder to find on today’s big Web than it is on lighter protocols.)
2 Also via Finger (but that’s another story).
The week before last I had the opportunity to deliver a “flash talk” of up to 4 minutes duration at a work meetup in Vienna, Austria. I opted to present a summary of what I’ve learned while adding support for Finger and Gopher protocols to the WordPress installation that powers DanQ.me (I also hinted at the fact that I already added Gemini and Spring ’83 support, and I’m looking at other protocols). If you’d like to see how it went, you can watch my flash talk here or on YouTube.
If you love the idea of working from wherever-you-are but ocassionally meeting your colleagues in person for fabulous in-person events with (now optional) flash talks like this, you might like to look at Automattic’s recruitment pages…
The presentation is a shortened, Automattic-centric version of a talk I’ll be delivering tomorrow at Oxford Geek Nights #53; so if you’d like to see it in-person and talk protocols with me over a beer, you should come along! There’ll probably be blog posts to follow with a more-detailed look at the how-and-why of using WordPress as a CMS not only for the Web but for a variety of zany, clever, retro, and retro-inspired protocols down the line, so perhaps consider the video above a “teaser”, I guess?
Just in time for Robin Sloan to give up on Spring ’83, earlier this month I finally got aroud to launching STS-6 (named for the first mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger in Spring 1983), my experimental Spring ’83 server. It’s been a busy year; I had other things to do. But you might have guessed that something like this had been under my belt when I open-sourced a keygenerator for the protocol the other day.
If you’ve not played with Spring ’83, this post isn’t going to make much sense to you. Sorry.
My server is, as far as I can tell, very different from any others in a few key ways:
{{board:123}}which are
automatically converted to addresses referencing the public key of the “current” keypair for that board. This separates the concept of a board and its content template from that
board’s keypairs, making it easier to link to a board. To put it another way, STS-6 links are self-healing on the server-side (for local boards).
<link rel="next"> connections to keep them current.
I’m sure that there are those who would see this as automating something that was beautiful because it was handcrafted; I don’t know whether or not I agree, but had Spring ’83 taken off in a bigger way, it would always only have been a matter of time before somebody tried my approach.
From a design perspective, I enjoyed optimising an SVG image of my header so it could meaningfully fit into the board. It’s pretty, and it’s tolerably lightweight.
If you want to see my server in action, patch this into your favourite Spring ’83 client:
https://s83.danq.dev/10c3ff2e8336307b0ac7673b34737b242b80e8aa63ce4ccba182469ea83e0623
Without Robin’s active participation, I feel that Spring ’83 is probably coming to a dead end. It’s been a lot of fun to play with and I’d love to see what ideas the experience of it goes on to inspire next, but in its current form it’s one of those things that’s an interesting toy, but not something that’ll make serious waves.
In his last lab essay Robin already identified many of the key issues with the system (too complicated, no interpersonal-mentions, the challenge of keys-as-identifiers, etc.) and while they’re all solvable without breaking the underlying mechanisms (mentions might be handled by Webmention, perhaps, etc.), I understand the urge to take what was learned from this experiment and use it to help inform the decisions of the next one. Just as John Postel’s Quote of the Day protocol doesn’t see much use any more (although maybe if my finger server could support QotD?) but went on to inspire the direction of many subsequent “call-and-response” protocols, including HTTP, it’s okay if Spring ’83 disappears into obscurity, so long as we can learn what it did well and build upon that.
Meanwhile: if you’re looking for a hot new “like the web but lighter” protocol, you should probably check out Gemini. (Incidentally, you can find me at gemini://danq.me, but that’s something I’ll write about another day…)