Nakilon's blog

Split your personal Internet space in half and automate to finally settle down?

Yesterday I found another bit of time to read about Gopher and Gemini. Explaining why it is a thing and why it's important would need an effort and I'm not used to teaching people essential things in English so I'll keep taking only technical notes.

Gemini is only ~4 years old. The specification is questionable. It feels like the author was some maximalist with either a lack of really rational experience or was making it with emotions involved. You can check out a comprehensive official FAQ here anyway and find the flaws yourself, but it's nevertheless a usable thing and I am imagining right now how to utilize it.
My Internet footprint is huge -- tons of websites, wikis, social networks. Some pages are fully editable and some are being derived in an automatic strictly defined way from your contribution, like, for example, a GitHub page before they introduced the username/README. The GitHub page still has things that many people would love to configure, such as the "achievements" panel that has links to some repos you maybe don't even want to be associated with. Every other try to make a new home page you make is usually an attempt to replace everything that you want to be considered to be left behind but every platform has its own topic and capabilities. I find myself (and maybe you do too) abandoning and starting from the scratch, that is in some way a pretty much practical thing but the iterations seem to go infinitely.
I feel myself in a pursue that will never end unless I change something. For example, I can aggregate all my internet "portraits" in one place (not necessarily one page or even one domain) so I'll not forget or lose anything anymore. Starting this blog gave me another idea -- I can utilize this tool to "write blog posts" but then I can export them to elsewhere. I can utilize this for the sake of simplicity and timestamps but nothing stops me from exporting the text content I create here to another place for needs of having another design, template or whatsoever. Now imagine the two spaces and a one-directional processing:

|bearblog posts            |               |some gemini hosting   |
|GitHub contributions      |               |S3-like static website|
|GitHub Gists              |               |github.io             |
|Reddit's "Saved"          |   compiling   |public Google Drive   |
|Google Keep notes         |               |public Yandex Drive   |
|Google Docs notes         | =>  using  =>           for
|10 years old Imgur profile|               |own blog timestamps   |
|Wikipedia, Esolang profile|   templates   |   and tags navigation|
|Steam guides, achievements|               |portfolio page        |
|YouTube uploads, playlists|               |CV in English         |
|RSS bookmarks             |               |CV in Russian         |
 etc.                                       etc.

A single processor/compiler (maybe on GitHub Actions) can:

  1. be a private catalog of all your online presence that you'll never forget anymore
  2. remind/notify if some third-party platform has changed or died
  3. do the job of updating multiple targets in one click, i.e. propagating changes

You are still free to:

  1. link pages duplicated between services, like the PDF CV in a CV hosted as Gemini
  2. link supplementary materials like adding Google Drive links to your HTML portfolio or blog post

So the main idea is to split your space in half. Draw a border and realize that ideally you edit manually only the LEFT side and when you want to share something ideally you share only the RIGHT side. Of course when you are asked for GitHub you can provide the link but ask yourself isn't there a reason behind the fact that they made the username/README and that when someone asks you about music you give him a story, not just a link to last.fm?

#CV #automation #blogging #gemini #portfolio #web