The Pacsule - Gemlog

2026-05-10: Hello Gemini!

I have a Web site on Neocities that's designed to evoke nostalgia for Web 1.0.

It (mostly) doesn't use any Javascript or even CSS, and the content is 95% text. So when I learned about Gemini, it felt like the site is a perfect contender for a Gemini mirror.

You'd think that a website with very rudimentary navigation and all textual content would be easy to transfer to gemtext. But I actually had to think hard and basically re-invent the structure of some pages.

I don't use JS or CSS on the site, so I had to rely on the semantic elements present in HTML itself - bold, italics, headers, a lot of inline links. There are also a lot of accessibility features like <abbr> tags and ARIA labels to improve readability and navigation on screen readers. To convert content to gemtext, I had to further simplify the already pretty minimalist markup.

Gemtext has no inline links, so some paragraphs previously containing links had to be rephrased. *Bold* and **italics** now have to be represented with asterisks like in Markdown. The Booklog section suffered a lot from the loss of ordered lists. There are no anchor links, either, which is another HTML feature I really like and often use.

Some sections are just different from their HTTPS:// version. I have a collection of Web links on the Web, it only makes sense that the Gemini link page should contain Gemini links instead.

It was a fun exercise, adapting my website to the Gemisphere! I'm quite happy with the result. I hope people enjoy my stuff that's now on Gemini. I will be adding more stuff in the future (my booklog, for example, is several months behind...).

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(ↄ) paradise-and-cola, 2026