smolweb

Nex in CapsulePress

I’ve added Nex support to CapsulePress!

What does that mean?

Nex is a lightweight Internet protocol reminiscent to me of Spartan (which CapsulePress also supports), but even more lightweight. Without even affordances like host identification, MIME types, response codes, or the expectation that Gemtext might be supported by the client, it’s perhaps more like Gopher than it is like Gemini.

It comes from the ever-entertaining smolweb hub of Nightfall City, whose Web interface clearly states at the top of every page the command you could have run to see that content over the Nex protocol. Lagrange added support for Nex almost a year ago and it’s such a lightweight protocol that I was quickly able to adapt CapsulePress’s implementation of Spartan to support Nex, too.

require 'gserver'
require 'word_wrap'
require 'word_wrap/core_ext'

class NexServer < GServer
  def initialize
    super(
      (ENV['NEX_PORT'] ? ENV['NEX_PORT'].to_i                           : 1900),
      (ENV['NEX_HOST']                                                 || '0.0.0.0'),
      (ENV['NEX_MAX_CONNECTIONS'] ? ENV['NEX_MAX_CONNECTIONS'].to_i : 4)
    )
  end

  def handle(io, req)
    puts "Nex: handling"
    io.print "\r\n"
    req = '/' if req == ''
    if response = CapsulePress.handle(req, 'nex')
      io.print response[:body].wrap(79)
    else
      io.print "Document not found\r\n"
    end
  end

  def serve(io)
    puts "Nex: client connected"
    req = io.gets.strip
    handle(io, req)
  end
end

This is genuinely the entirety of my implementation of my Nex server, atop CapsulePress. And it’s mostly boilerplate.

Why, you might ask? Well, the reasons are the same as all the other standards supported by CapsulePress:

The smolweb is awesome.
Making WordPress into a CMS things it was never meant to do is sorta my jam.
It was a quick win while I waited for the pharmacist to shoot me up with ~~5G microchips~~ my ‘flu and Covid boosters.

If you want to add Nex onto your CapsulePress, just git pull the latest version, ensure TCP port 1900 isn’t firewalled, and don’t add USE_NEX=false to your environment. That’s all!

How to Monetize a Blog

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work. A single article can take weeks of research, drafting and editing, collecting and producing included materials, etc. It’s not unusual to seek some form of compensation for it, and those rewards require initiative. With a good monetization strategy, it can become a fairly lucrative venture.

So let’s talk about monetizing a blog, starting with the most obvious and perhaps easiest avenue: display advertising.

A content creator with an established audience can leverage that audience and sell ad space on their blog. Here’s an example:

…

Tyler

I’m not sure I have words for how awesome this blog post is. If you’ve ever wanted to monetise your blog and are considering an ad-driven model, this should absolutely be the first (and perhaps last) thing you read on the subject.

If you’re not convinced that Tyler is an appropriate authority to speak on this subject, I highly suggest you visit their other site that’s got a wealth of useful tips, PutAToothpickInTheChargingPortDoctorsHateThatShit.christmas. Yes, really.

Home Page, 50% Off!

In August, I celebrated my blog – with its homepage weighing-in at a total of just 481kb – being admitted to Kev Quirk‘s 512kb club. 512kb club celebrates websites (often personal sites) whose homepage are neither “ultra minimal” or “link pages” but have a total size, including all assets, of under half a megabyte. It’s about making a commitment to a leaner, more-efficient Web.

My relatively-heavyweight homepage only just slipped in under the line. But, feeling inspired perhaps by some performance enhancements I’ve been planning this week at work, I decided to try to shave a little more off:

Now, at ~234kb, danq.me just beats the excellent gomakethings.com (it’s all those heavyweight fonts, Chris!).

Here’s what I changed:

The “recent article” tiles are dynamically sized based on their number, type, and the visitor’s screen resolution. But apart from the top one they’re almost never very large. Using thumbnail images for the non-first tile shaved off almost 160kb.

Not space-saving, but while I was in there I ensured that the first tile’s image – which almost-certainly comprises part of the Largest Contentful Paint – is never delivered with loading="lazy".
I was providing a shortcut icon in .ico format (<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/_q23t/icons/favicon-16-32-48-64-128.ico" />), which is pretty redundant nowadays because all modern browsers (and even IE11) support .png icons. I was already providing .png and .svg versions, but it turns out that some browsers favour the one with the (harmful?) rel="shortcut icon" over rel="icon" if both are present, and .ico files are – being based on Windows Bitmaps – horrendously inefficient.

By getting under the 250kb threshold, I’ve jumped up a league from Blue Team to Orange Team, so that’s nice too. I can’t see a meaningful path from where I’m at to Green Team (under 100kb) though, so this level might have to suffice.

Last-minute additions:

Here’s the PR updating my site’s record in the club
If you like the animation, here’s the JavaScript code I used to generate it (plus a quick crossfade made in Kdenlive)

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.

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:

my weblog, at https://danq.me/2023/09/10/capsulepress‎,
my gemlog, at gemini://danq.me/posts/capsulepress,
my spartanlog, at spartan://danq.me/posts/capsulepress, and
my goperhole, at gopher://danq.me/1/posts/capsulepress

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.