I am finding my way through creating not only this
server for others, but also a writing space and landing page for my
personal outlet. Over the last few months I have made several attempts
at making a blog.
First as a python flask project which turned out to
be too complex for my little brain. I couldn't wrap my head around
routing traffic through a 'reverse proxy'.
That led me to a little web framework called HUGO thanks to Luke
Smith on You Tube. It was pretty overwhelming, but led me to a deep
appreciation of writing in MarkDown. I nearly gave up because HUGO wouldn't
recognizing my css (It took me a LONG time to figure out my
very simple mistake- editing the wrong file!).
Once I figured out my mistake, I was left feeling...underwhelmed and not in control.
The pages looked good, but there were little tweaks I wanted to make
and I didn't have the knowledge of Golang(Hugo's backbone) to tweak what I wanted.
At some point I decided to stick to the templates provided,
after all, I had learned a LOT about Markdown, web hosting and how
things worked.
It was right in that moment when I found out about the gemini protocol through the always
fantastic and informative 2600 zine. The article talked about the desire
for people to have a more stripped down experience online. An experience
closer to what the early internet provided for a lot of people in a time
that seems so far away. I quickly found the stripped down gemini protocol
fascinating and spun up a server and a capsule at
gemini://repl-rebl.xyz
Curiosity and exploration of gemini space left me continuously seeing the
words ~tilde.club making an appearance. It's what led me BACK to
the http internet and starting THIS! A long and winding road but I was
lucky to come across some great tutorials and articles on the subject
to lead the way. Since tilde servers are designed to give the users on
the server their own home for their websites, html and css were the simple
building blocks that I was looking for/avoiding all along. I am finding the
creation of a simple website very satisfying than using a framework was.
I am still trying to get a good workflow going for writing these blog entries
and sharing images, but it's getting easier. At the moment I have html
templates for each page catagory and I just write directly into the html
document. There's probably a better way, and I'm confident i'll figure it
out eventually.
PEACE.