Create subscribable geminis!

When you post a new gemini here on flounder.online or elsewhere how do people know without browsing to your site?

There do of course exist technologies which long ago solved this problem. RSS and Atom are two such protocols and are well worth looking into especially for more prolific bloggers.

But there is also a very simple convention which has been proposed over at gemini.circumlunar.space which allows anyone to simply edit their own geminis by hand and so long as a few simple rules are followed then any browsers which have the ability will pick up the new post if they have subscribed to the URL.

The original proposal can be read here:

//gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/companion/subscription.gmi

Example index.gmi file

# Fedi's Gemlog    <-- notice this should be descriptive of the feed 

Welcome to my Gemlog, where I blog about gemini. 

## Blog posts
***notice that the following 3 links are followed by a date in the format YYYY-MM-DD; this is the key item to note to make your gemlog subscribable under this format.***
=> third-blog.gmi	2020-12-10 - av98 is a nice gemini client 
=> second-blog.gmi	2020-12-03 - flounder.online lets you create geminis
=> first-blog.gmi	2020-12-01 - Gemini uwu!

## Other gemlogs I enjoy
***notice that the following 3 links are NOT followed by a date and so will not be picked up by the feed.***
=> gemini://someone-elses-url buying a second-hand car
=> gemini://someone-elses-url qutebrowser is great!	
=> gemini://someone-elses-url what is a pikkulog?	
 

End of Example index.gmi file

How to make it work on flounder

Follow through the previous two posts I made about creating a gemlog folder and adding an index.gmi file. (Alternatively your account should have a default index.gmi file in the top directory). Now edit your index.gmi file to include the date of the blog posts in the format YYYY-MM-DD as above. Any hyperlink lines with that date format directly after the link will be picked up by compatible feed readers and others won't.

Shortcomings

As the original proposal points out there are shortcomings with this convention mainly to do with no time of day or timezone being communicated, but for simple personal blogs it is perfectly ok.

Also some people like the fact that geminispace is much more 'human' and a large part of its charm is that you can browse around it without knowing what you will find so feel free to not implement this feature.