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gemini_site_setup_and_hosting_features

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Introduction

Welcome to the wonderful retro/alternative future of Gemini space!

Creating your own Gemini site (“gemini capsule” the kids call them now) can be fun and SDF gives gemini space to all its MetaARPA users, so the moment you become META (see https://sdf.org/?join) you can begin creating your own websites straight away.

In this tutorial when text looks like this this means it's a command you can run in your shell, once you've logged into the meta array SDF.

Getting Started

Gemini hosting is super easy on SDF.

  • Log in to the MetaArray
  • create your directory in /meta/gemini with at least a index.gmi file: mkdir -p /meta/gemini/${LOGNAME}

Now on to make your first gemini page!

Your First Page!

Creating your first page is SO easy! First you'll need to open a text editor. SDF has many text editors installed but new users to UNIX often find that nano is the easiest to work with.

nano /meta/gemini/${LOGNAME}/index.gmi

This command starts the nano text editor, creating a new file, called 'index.gmi' in your /meta/gemini/{username} directory.

Once you've executed the command above. You'll notice that the terminal layout has changed. If you press keys on your keyboard you'll notice they appear in the “text buffer”. Write out the text below into this program.

#My First Page!

This is my first page in Gemini space!

==> gemini://gem.sdf.org  Back to the SDF Gemini Homepage

Now that you have copied the text out into 'nano', you need to save the file. To do this, hold down the 'CTRL' key on your keyboard and whilst pressing that, press the letter 'x', and respond “yes” to the request to save. You've just written your first gemtext file. It's a very simple markup language compared to HTML, as you can see.

Now, just open a Gemini browser and navigate to gemini://gem.sdf.org/{yourusername}. You should see your very own Gemini capsule!

Once you've created your directory and index.gmi file you will be added to the top index. Sites are listed by most recent activity first and will include a title if you have one in your index.gmi

Viewing Your Gemini Homepage

You can use either of these Gemini browsers on the cluster or in the MetaArray:

  • bombadillo: at shell type bombadillo gemini://gem.sdf.org/{yourusername}
  • av98: at shell type av98 gemini://gem.sdf.org/{yourusername}

Additionally, on the metaarray, you can use diohsc

Fleshing Out Your Gemini Capsule

You can get more direction on the native markup for Gemini, called gemtext by reading the gemtext specification, which can be found by navigating to gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi

gemini_site_setup_and_hosting_features.1615577286.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021/03/12 19:28 by peteyboy