Link labels in every capsule index are now ISO 8601 and lead with the date,
which is what Gemini's subscription convention reads a feed entry from: the
first ten characters of a label must parse as YYYY-MM-DD or the line is
ignored. The board's `09 Oct 26` parsed as nothing, so the front page, the
archive and all six areas registered zero entries and the capsule was
invisible to every aggregator in Geminispace. `/archive` now carries 36.
The Connect page advertised `/feeds/all.rss.xml` and `/feeds/all.atom.xml`,
which exist only in the HTML build and 404 over Gemini. That paragraph now
sits behind an itsybitsy `only html` format gate, with prose outside it that
is true on both faces. The gate can only cut that way round: Pelican does not
implement the directive and renders it as an inert comment, so a gate
subtracts from the capsule and never from the site.
Also adds dormant `SMOLNET_COMMENTS` support, for a per-article thread link
gated to the text formats. Off until kapara is deployed, since setting it
would put a dead link under every article.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A message base is a thing people answer, and until now this one could only be
read. The site already calls its articles messages in areas, so replies are the
feature the metaphor was asking for rather than a comment box bolted onto it.
Talks to the comment server's API directly instead of loading its widget. The
widget is a React app in an iframe and would arrive with its own fonts, spacing
and avatars; an iframe cannot inherit the page's font in any case. Rules are
drawn the way the guestbook draws them, padded to exactly 80 cells, so a reply
is indistinguishable from any other row on the board. All five pre elements in
the section measure 80 in a real browser.
Two things this surfaced, both verified by driving a browser rather than curl:
The command handler took every letter key as a command, which was harmless when
there was nothing on the board to type into. With a message box, typing `i`
navigated to the index mid-sentence. It now ignores keys aimed at an input or
textarea.
bbs.js already says the bracket chrome is a promise rather than decoration, and
[P]ost was drawn without wiring P to anything. P now focuses the message box.
Handles are checked here as well as at the server, since remark42 wants three
or more characters and only letters, numbers, underscores and spaces; failing
in the page is better than a refusal with no explanation.
Without JS the section is simply absent, which is honest, and the capsule never
sees it since Gemini has no way to render it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Twelve images across seven articles were hotlinked from servers that no longer
exist, so they were broken on the live sites. Checked every one against the
Wayback Machine, patiently enough to trust the answer: an earlier pass appeared
to find seven, but that was a test treating an empty response as a hit.
One survives. visualberlin.org's p1010789, a 2011 capture of the projector set
up against Mannheim city hall during the Flimmerkiste wildscreening, is now a
local asset in flux.vision/content/library/ and the reference points at it.
The other eleven were never captured. Both dead domains are archived, so this is
not a gap in coverage: of 8,438 visualberlin.org URLs and 204 for mutanten.org,
only that one image is there. mutanten.org's archive does not reach back to its
fp-content era at all, which is where the Logan's Run stills lived.
So lostimages.py learns about dead hosts, which it matches rather than fetching,
because a build must not depend on the network and a dead host is a fact about
the world rather than about the document. The references stay in the Markdown,
as the existing ones do: the reference records what was there.
It matters more on the capsule than on the web. A browser shows a broken image
as a silent gap, but gemtext has no inline images, so every one becomes a
visible => link line and the page would advertise a dead host as somewhere worth
going. smolnet.py therefore strips them too, reading the same host list, since
it works on the Markdown source and never sees Pelican's output.
lostimages.py moves to the repo-level plugins/ directory beside smolnet. It was
shared already, with flux.vision reaching into tobias.raayoni-last.com for it,
and randogoth.com now needs it too; a shared plugin living inside one site was
the wrong shape for three consumers.
Left alone deliberately: the two mutanten.org links in mutantenkino-website.md.
That entry is about having built the site, so the link is its subject rather
than decoration, and a dead link does not make the record wrong.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Pelican generator that writes a capsule beside the HTML build: plain
Markdown plus per-directory .itsybitsy.toml sidecars, which a protocol daemon
converts per request to gemtext, XHTML-MP, WML or plain text.
The obstacle was recorded in the README as "smolweb reads YAML frontmatter
while Pelican uses bare Title: lines". Both halves turned out to be wrong:
itsybitsy parses no frontmatter at all, by design, and metadata lives outside
the document. So the transform is not a translation between dialects, it is a
removal, and a protocol daemon stays ignorant of one static generator.
Nothing in plugins/smolnet.py is specific to this site. Every difference is a
setting and every setting has a default, so another site enables it with
PLUGINS = ['smolnet']. It sits at the repo root for the same reason
flux.vision reaches into tobias.raayoni-last.com for lostimages.
Index entries are emitted as link-only paragraphs rather than Markdown lists,
which is not a style choice: the gemtext renderer prints a bare => line for a
paragraph holding nothing but links, and a bullet *and* a => line for a list
item, so a list would publish every entry twice. Gemini clients number link
lines themselves, so the board's dial-an-area-by-number idiom survives into
the capsule without emitting a single bracket. The trade-off is in the
docstring: the text renderer reflows such a run into prose, which costs
nothing here because randogoth.com is not getting Nex or Gopher.
Also drops a Zemanta tracking pixel that came in with a 2012 blog import and
is live on the site today, firing a third-party request on every view of that
article. It would have been worse in the capsule, where an image becomes a
visible link line advertising a dead tracker. It was the only one across all
three sites.
Verified by serving the output with the real daemon: 41 articles, 2 pages, 6
area indexes and an archive, no metadata surviving, no {filename} left,
trl@posteo.net revealed on Connect where the renderer would otherwise have
dropped it with its enclosing HTML, images served as image/png, and the index
rendering as a clean run of => lines in gemtext and as XHTML Mobile over HTTP.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
flux.vision, tobias.raayoni-last.com and randogoth.com. They were one site until
October 2026, serving four audiences from a single dated list, which is the only
format that can hold unrelated things at once.
flux.vision is recovered from the Wayback Machine, where it had sat since being
deleted in 2021: 90 articles, closed and maintained rather than updated.
tobias.raayoni-last.com is the professional record, 97 articles back to 1999.
randogoth.com is the technical work, 41 articles across six areas, served as an
ANSI bulletin board.
History starts here deliberately. The development history, the 266-row inventory
that records why each article went where it did, the Wayback pipelines, the
pruned articles, the source archives and the full-size images are kept beside
the repo rather than in it, so a clone is the web presence and not the argument
that produced it. REFACTOR.md is gitignored for the same reason. See README.md
for where that material lives, and keep it: the sort is not reproducible from
these three directories alone.
Each site documents itself in its own README, including the traps that cost time
and look like nothing when you get them wrong.
