# Gemini Site To-Dos (created Jan 27, 2021) Within the past week, I have been trying to catch up on my Gemini reading by visiting Gemini sites and the Gemini email listserv. I've been out of the loop for a couple months for various reasons. Gemini to-do for my site: self-signed cert. I think that solderpunk wrote a command line utility to do this. [Completed on Jan 29, 2021 by using solderpunk's gemcert utility.] Another Gemini user did this: => > I finally got with the program, and started using a long-lived self-signed certificate for my Gemini server, rather than the letsencrypt certificate my other services use. So if you're seeing a warning that the cert has changed, that's to be expected and is not a problem. But it will probably not change for quite some time in the future now. And until the past week or so, I had not realized that a Gemini Feed had been proposed. In my opinion, this is similar to the IndieWeb.org's h-feed concept. I thought that Project Gemini would have proposed its own "gemfeed" format early on, instead of adopting the Atom XML feed format. More from the above same carcosa.net page: > Journal is now a Gemini Feed > I've been serving an atom feed for my gemlog, and will continue to do so. But I've also updated the main index page to be a compliant Gemini feed, so that people who prefer to use that kind of subscription can use it. The Commonplace Book will not appear in gmi feeds, but its updates will still appear in the atom feed. From another Gemini user: => > On a completely unrelated note, I've updated my gemlog index to match the new format that was pitched by solderpunk. I like this method a lot more than maintaining an atom feed using a build script. It's both elegant and functional. If I were to start fresh, I would write my gemlog index by hand and skip the atom feed completely. But it's already setup so it seems like a waste to not use it now. The Gemini feed format is simpler than my gemfeed idea. => Here's the specific post about the Gemini feed format for homepages or the index pages for posts. => Another item to ponder: navigation on Gemini pages. => Post from November 2020: => Excerpts: > It's been well over a week since I discovered Gemini and my life has been immeasurably better for it. There's a lot about Gemini that I love but at the heart of it is one of its guiding design criteria. Simplicity. > Each day I spend in Geminispace makes this principle of simplicity shine through a different aspect. I already knew Gemini was simple when it only took me minutes to setup a server on my VPS and serve a page. This is a far cry from setting up a web service stack. However, it was when I decided to write something, which is now this post, that the beauty and simplicty of gemtext struck me. > With gemtext, and its likeness to Markdown, I'm almost serving my raw thoughts directly. Since Markdown is how I format my notes, as long as there are no links in it I could simply drop one into my server and call it a day. That's how low friction a process gemtext makes it and that's the reason you're reading this today instead of maybe... never. -30- ``` dir : 2021/01/27 ```