How this site works

This is where my gemlog/blog lives. It is statically generated with Hugo and rsync-ed to my public_html and public_gemini directories for HTML and gemini on tilde.cafe respectively on build.

The site source is always linked at the footer, pointing to the sourcehut repo though the repo is also mirrored on github.

# tilde.cafe and the Tildeverse

[The Tildeverse is] a loose association of like-minded tilde communities. Tildes are pubnixes in the spirit of tilde.club, which was created in 2014 by Paul Ford

A Pubnix is a Public Access Unix System — in other words, a unix machine on the internet that provides access to other people on the internet — which started before WWW and even the public internet. Pubnixes you may have heard of SDF, Circumlunar.Space (yes, the very same one of the gemini homepage), and tilde.club.

~cmccabe has a Pubnix History Project for you to explore if you’re interested in learning more about pubnixes.

There are a lot of pubnixes that have joined the Tildeverse since the the ~club and ~team (which hosts the tildeverse website together with many services).

Most tildes have open registerations. Users are provided around 1 GB of disk space along with SSH access and are able to host their own static site with CGI under the main tilde domain, together with services like email, gemini/gopher hosting, pastbin, and more.

However, the true value of tildes lie not in the services they provide but the people and community. The tildeverse has an official IRC network, tilde.chat, which most tildes use for their main channel of communication. They also have a radio, a mastodon instance, gitea instance, among other services. The latter two from the above are both hosted by ~ben the owner of ~team.

I chose to host my personal website on tilde.cafe, a (relatively) newer tilde that runs on Debian with a smaller user base, and for the past two years most coding projects I had done were developed on ~Cafe’s server. It’s grown to become my second digital home on the internet ever since I started to use hedy at tilde.cafe for my primary email.

It was fun to work with ~cafe admins ~spider and ~jan6 in the early days, helping to set up and write the wiki and automated website builds. We used the #cafe channel on tilde.chat for our main chat.

Some time in 2021 or 2022, jan6 is no longer able to chat with us on #cafe in tilde.chat, and since spider became busy with work and other areas of life, we needed one more admin to take care of user support on tilde.cafe. I was promoted to join spider and jan6 as sudoers and have been helping with signups and sysadmin’ing since then.

I don’t plan to move off ~cafe to host my personal website, nor email in the foreseable future. Though when I have side-projects that required dedicated servers with subdomains, I will consider using my own server and domain. Until then, I remain eternally grateful to ~cafe and other tilde-owners for maintaining awesome communities and providing welcoming spaces online for strangers to come together and build cool stuff, with money from the admin’s own pockets.

If you’re someone who is recently discovering the tildeverse I highly recommend rawtext.club (though not a “tilde” but a very cool community of extremely interesting people), ~team (they have a welcoming chat — #team — easily second most active channel on tilde.chat), ~envs (they have an Akkoma instance, used by Rohan Kumar from seirdy.one whose articles you may have come across on the internet), and of course ~cafe (drop me an email if you registered after reading this and I’ll make sure to personally approve your sign-up ;P). Others may not agree on my choices so this is not at all to downplay the worth of other tildes: there’s almost no harm in having an account on every single one, though you can definitely meet some cool people!

# Software stack & workflows

No javascript is used. All content is written in Markdown and Gemtext, with the static HTMl output generated by Hugo. The styling is done with vanilla CSS, syntax highlighting provided by chroma.

When a new blog post is written, I would ensure both markdown and gemtext sources are done, then I would run make which uses Hugo and does some miscellaneous cleaning-up to produce HTMl files at ~/public_html and gemtext at ~/public_gemini. I then use a browser to access the folder locally to check that everything is working. When something needs updating, a single make is enough to rebuild the entire site.

Finally, I commit and push. If I wasn’t working on ~cafe directly I would next log into ~cafe, pull, and make from there. It’s guaranteed to perform the same from my home computer and on ~cafe given the same Hugo versions.

Since I ran make on ~cafe, the actual ~/public_* directories will be updated on the changes would be live! 🎉

~cafe web server handles the rest. (FTR: on WWW we use nginx and on Gemini we use Gemserv.)

# Hosting

The site and gemini capsule is to be accessed at hedy.tilde.cafe; it works on both protocols. You may be curious how we could have per-user vhosts on gemini — no, there is no built-in configuration option as of writing. This is done with a shell script that appends to config file a separate server configuration when a new user sign-up is approved, written by jan6.

The <user>.tilde.cafe vhost is also supported on spartan. I wrote the spartan server that cafe uses (spsrv) and it provides a config option to use per-user vhosts.