CapsulePress – Gemini / Spartan / Gopher to WordPress bridge

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.

Diagram illustrating the behaviour of CapsulePress: a WordPress installation provides content, and CapsulePress makes that content available via gemini://, spartan://, and gopher:// URLs.

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:

Composite screenshot showing this blog post in, from top-left to bottom-right: (1) Firefox, via HTTPS, (2) Lagrange, via Gemini, (3) Lagrange, via Spartan, and (4) Lynx, via Gopher.

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!

90s-style web banners in the style of Netscape ads, saying "Gemini now!", "Spartan now!", and "Gopher now!". Beneath then a wider banner ad promotes CapsulePress v0.1.
Using Gemini and friends in the 2020s make me feel like the dream of the Internet of the nineties and early-naughties is still alive. But with fewer banner ads.

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:

  • It’s hard to use. While not as hacky as the disparate piles of code it replaced, it’s still not the cleanest. To modify it you’ll need a basic comprehension of all three protocols, plus Ruby, SQL, and sysadmin skills.
  • It’s super opinionated. It’s very much geared towards my use case. It’s improved by the use of templates. but it’s still probably only suitable for this site for the time being, until you make changes.
  • It’s very-much unfinished. I’ve got a growing to-do list, which should be a good clue that it’s Not Finished. Maybe it never will but. But there’ll be changes yet to come.

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.)

Footnotes

1 Also available via Gemini.

2 Also via Finger (but that’s another story).

3 Also available via Spartan.

4 Need a browser? I suggest Lagrange.

90s-style web banners in the style of Netscape ads, saying "Gemini now!", "Spartan now!", and "Gopher now!". Beneath then a wider banner ad promotes CapsulePress v0.1.× Diagram illustrating the behaviour of CapsulePress: a WordPress installation provides content, and CapsulePress makes that content available via gemini://, spartan://, and gopher:// URLs.× Composite screenshot showing this blog post in, from top-left to bottom-right: (1) Firefox, via HTTPS, (2) Lagrange, via Gemini, (3) Lagrange, via Spartan, and (4) Lynx, via Gopher.×

Yesterday’s Internet Today! (Woo DM 2023)

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?