 About two months ago, I made a video about the Gemini protocol, which is an alternative internet protocol. It's an alternative to HTTP, the modern web protocol. And what I really love about Gemini is it's for the most part just plain text. It really reminds me of the early web because the modern web, I can't stand. The modern web is just slow and bloated and it's not even fun. Like I hate browsing the web now. Like if I just open a browser and start searching through just random web pages I've never been to before, you know, back in the 1990s, that was fun. That was exciting. Now, it absolutely sucks because 99% of the internet now is dominated by a handful of corporations that own all of these sites. It's all corporate dominated and it's all driven by ads. It's just ads everywhere, JavaScript everywhere, images and multimedia that's auto start playing in the browser and it's just a mess. Back in the 1990s, it was for the most part just plain text because our internet speeds were so bad in the early days of the web, nobody really used images and video was unheard of. You wouldn't put a video on a website back in the 90s. For the most part, it was strictly plain text and it was exciting because it wasn't all driven by ad revenue back then. So other than just big corporations, you actually had normal people like you and me building their own websites and, you know, putting their thoughts onto the web and it was a much more interesting web. And Gemini kind of brings back that interest, that excitement, that new car smell that the early web had. Gemini kind of reminds me of that. Let me open my browser here and let me zoom in. Let's open up distro.tube and this is my Gemini capsule. If you guys want to check it out, of course, you need a Gemini client and then you need to navigate to gemini colon slash slash distro.tube. And I've been working on my Gemini capsule for the last couple of months. I've been keeping it up to date and I've been exploring other people's Gemini capsules and I really like the Gemini space. Again, it's a friendlier place because no one makes money using the Gemini protocol. The fact that JavaScript is not possible in Gemini means there's no ads and there's no ad networks at all. It would be very difficult for somebody to monetize a Gemini capsule and that really gets rid of all the corporate BS that nominates the modern web. And one of the things I love about setting up these Gemini capsules is it's so simple. Anyone can do it. You don't really have to have this in-depth knowledge of HTML and CSS and MySQL databases. You don't need to know how to configure the Apache web server or the Engine X web server. Let me open up my DOOM Emacs here and let me navigate to where I have the source code here on my system for distro.tube. And let me open up my index.gmi. This is actually the home page you guys saw in the M4a Gemini client here, which is a terminal Gemini client. That is M4a displaying my Gemini index page. And this is what the index page looks like in plain text. So it's almost exactly the same, right, other than, you know, instead of having these numbers, which are the numbers I type in M4a to follow the links, you know, I have the equal sign followed by the greater than sign here. Let me zoom in so you guys can see that. But for the most part, everything is almost exactly the same. It displays almost like there's very few differences from what I typed in that plain text file to what is actually displayed in a Gemini client. Now, in comparison, what we could do is let me get to a new workspace here. Let me go to distro.tube.com, which is my HTTP site. And this is the index page for it. And, you know, I don't have a lot going on with this. But if you check the source code for this, let me right click view page source. I mean, this is the HTML, right? This is not just plain text, right? Almost everything on that web page is wrapped in at least one tag, you know, maybe multiple tags, and it's mostly a mess. You know, there's very little text on that page, right? If we talk about plain text, there's this, there's this, and then some titles and descriptions of some videos. And then I've got these three articles here. And there's a little bit of a preview of these articles, you know, probably about six or eight paragraphs of text, small paragraphs of text. Why is the HTML this long, right? This is, this is not easy to work with. And I have spent, I mean, from the early days of the web, I've been building websites, so I'm actually pretty comfortable with HTML and CSS and even PHP and JavaScript and things like that. But why have we gotten to the point that we need all of that to display what should be, you know, just a simple web page? And that's kind of what Gemini is getting us back to. Because Gemini is very limited. Gemini will always be just plain text. You're never going to get JavaScript with Gemini. You're never going to be working with databases with Gemini. It's just not possible. That's not part of the protocol right now. And that's not going to be part of the protocol in the future. So what I've been thinking about doing is actually, I'm going to get rid of my HTTP site distrotube.com. Well, I've got the domain name. I still have the domain and I may have something on it, but I'm going to get rid of the bloat, right? What I want to do is the gemini colon slash slash distro.tube. That is going to be my main site, my personal site for all things distrotube. And this is where I'm going. And I want your guys input on this because I think just having plain text is fine for everything I do. I know I have videos out there that people want to watch. But if I go to, I don't know, let me go to videos from 2021 here. And if I clicked this link even in Gemini, it will actually open the Brave browser and start playing that link. It's on a different workspace, but it'll play that last video that I put out. So you can still watch videos. You can still get images. They won't be displayed in the Gemini client itself. They'll just open those images and those videos or download those files in a separate program. Now, I know not everybody knows about the Gemini protocol yet. Not everybody has a Gemini client installed like Amphora or Lagrange. So I do need to keep something up on the web that people can go and... I want the same information to be available both with the Gemini protocol and the HTTP protocol. So what I did is I searched through the Arch Linux repositories and I found this program called GMI to HTML. It will take a GMI file, for example, the source code for myindex.gmi. It will take that and it will convert it to HTML for me. And because of the power of shell scripting, what I think I can do is I can write a nice little script that will actually convert my entire Gemini site over to HTML. So I've been working on this little script. It's nowhere near complete, but it already kind of works. And I won't go through everything this is doing, but basically I navigate to the source code directory distro.tube here on my system. And once I'm in that directory, I run this script and it's going to run the tree command. It's going to list out everything in that directory. Basically all the files recursively. And I'm gripping.gmi because I want all the .gmi files. And then I want that listed in a plain text file. I'm going to call gmi underscore list. And then I'm going to take gmi underscore list. And I'm going to redirect that into this array. This array is going to be named options. And for i in options do. So I've got a for loop here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take all of those gmi files. And then I'm going to do a quick substitution instead. I'm going to rename them instead of index.gmi, for example. Now it's going to be index.html. So I want to convert all the gmi files to HTML files. And then I'm going to pipe them into the gmi to HTML tool that I found over on the arch user repository. And then I've got them being directed into a new directory I created called html slash. And then the name of the file .html is a bit of a complicated script. But basically what that does is now let me open up my graphical file manager because this will be the easiest way to see this. So if I navigate to distro.tube here. This is where all of my gemini files were the gmi files. But when I run this script what it does it creates this directory here called html. And then all of my gmi files have been converted to html. So you guys saw index.gmi over in the m4 client. Now what would the index.html look like now? Let me get my file manager over here near the web browser and let me show you what the index.html would look like here. It looks exactly like the gemini client, right? I've made it look almost exactly the same. I can't remember which workspace I was on workspace for. Now there's workspace for with my distro.tube site in gemini. And there is distro.tube converted to html. Now the only thing I did have to do to make this look right is I did have to add a little css because of course by default this is going to be a white background with black text and it's blinding. It's just blinding to the eyes and it's just hard to read. Nobody would visit this site if it was like that. So I did add a little color. I created my own style sheet here and I also played with the fonts and a little bit of the spacing. But for the most part I really didn't do much with the css here. I wanted it to be as nice and minimal. I wanted it to look as much like m4 in the terminal as possible. Even though this is of course html displayed in the brave browser. And all of my gemini files have been converted. So I can click on that which was 2021-videos.gmi. It's now 2021-videos.html. So I've converted all the files over that needed to be converted and everything appears to be working. Now this is running on localhost. I have not uploaded this to distro.tube.com yet because I wanted to keep my site up until I've converted all the pages because I do have to go back. I've got blogs that I haven't yet converted over to the Gemini site. So I'm still working on that. I'm probably a few days away for this here to go live in both Gemini and HTTP. But that's the direction I'm heading because it just doesn't make sense. I don't enjoy playing on the web anymore. I don't enjoy navigating around the web anymore. And I definitely don't enjoy building my own websites. That's just not where I want to be. So I'm really excited about moving more toward Gemini. I'm going to start putting a lot more content on my Gemini capsule. I also want you guys to start experimenting with Gemini. Most of you guys probably have simple blogs and you probably are running that stuff on bloated things like WordPress and Joomla and Drupal and all these content management systems that are not necessary. Unless you have hundreds or maybe thousands of pages on a website, it doesn't need to be database driven. It doesn't need to be managed by any content management system. It just needs to be plain text files that you manage yourself. You can even version control them on your GitHub or your GitLab. If it's open sourced, of course, you can have the community contribute to it. And that's what I've done with both my website at distrotube.com. And I'm going to do that with distro.tube on Gemini as well. You guys, I've got articles that I've written, but of course I've got guest articles. People have submitted to me for the website and I've converted those over to the Gemini site as well. If you guys want to submit any guest articles, you can do that. Just go to my GitLab. You'll find the distro.tube repository on my GitLab. If you've got anything you want to share, if it's Linux or software related in any way, I'll probably publish it. Just make sure it actually needs to be written in gem text. In a GMI format, don't send it in HTML. Don't send it in markdown because I'd have to put in some work to convert that. So please use the GMI format, which is very simple. The GMI format, the style is very simple. All you need to know is that for headings, you need to have a top level heading, which is one hash symbol. Second level headings are two hash symbols and you can have a third level. And that's as far down as you can go as far as headers. So just three levels. Other than that, I've shown you the links, how to do the links. It is, well, I have already closed. Well, let me go back into this file here for the links. All you need is the equal sign followed by the greater than sign and then the URL. And then if you want to outside the URL, you can give it a description. If you don't give it a description, the actual thing that will be displayed will be the URL. If you give it a description, it displays the description. So there's that first link we were just looking at. The only other thing that you can do with the syntax in GMI is you can do bulleted list. These are just asterisks. That's it. And pre-formatted text. Pre-formatted text is three back ticks in a row. So I've got three back ticks here and three back ticks here. That means all of this is pre-formatted text, which means it's going to respect all the spacing. If you have a lot of white space, it will keep the white space. So that is how you get the really cool little ASCII art and everything in M4. I also like using pre-formatted text, like in the articles. If I do anything that involves any kind of code blocks, because sometimes the code block, you need it to respect spacing. If you have some spacing, you tab over five spaces or something. I don't have anything in this particular article that shows that. But I would use pre-formatted text for displaying code blocks. Overall, after using Gemini for two months, I love it. I really do think Gemini has a bright future. Will Gemini ever replace the web? No, because Gemini is not the same thing. An all-text format is not the same as HTML, right? HTML, if you want to do anything multi-media related, you have to do it on the modern web. But for most people, most people are just doing stuff that can be done in plain text. And for that, Gemini makes much more sense, the fact that it can be displayed in the terminal, the fact that because it's plain text, I mean, you can use things like Curl and WGet, you can even do some fancy scripting where you can pull information from a Gemini site. So if somebody is leaving status information, like people put status information on their social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, you could pull that stuff down from the internet and display it like a widget on your panel or something. Really, just Gemini has me excited about using the internet again. And I think that's great. Now, before I go, I do need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Absi Dallas, Gabe Liu, Mitchell, Alan Akami, Hartree 2032, David the Other, David Dillon, Gregory Lewis, Paul Scott, Wes and Willie. These guys, they are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. These last two months with Gemini, well, I still would have played with Gemini, but these guys really helped me out because they helped support my work over on Patreon. Also, all these ladies and gentlemen as well, all of these guys are great too. And if you'd like to support my work, look for a distro tube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. I wonder if we can get 4chan to move to Gemini.