A Quick Update And My Summer Plans

June 12, 2023

It’s been a while since I wrote something. I don’t get a lot of time to write or browse Geminispace as it is, but that’s been exacerbated with back-to-back finals seasons from my schools. Fortunately, it’s summer now, which means I have a day off each week.

In keeping with the ethos of “almost everything here is under construction right now” and “[pushing frequently with little-to-no regard for log-quality] forces me to work on the site because otherwise I have poor-quality files accessible”,¹ ² I decided to let you all know what I’ve been working on and what’s to come.

Object oriented programming in POSIX-compliant shell

I made a proof-of-concept and a few utilities of Shell OOP, and I’m going to write a post explaining how it works. If you’re interested, you can check out the repositories now (I still have to license them, make READMEs, and etc; they’re going to be AFL 3.0).

Simple, transparent, useful, and robust Gemini fragments

I remember a discussion of URL fragments for Gemini on the mailing list, and I think I’ve figured out a solution which checks all of the boxes and doesn’t break anything.

Fully mechanical vending machine

I love building mechanical vending machines. I’ve built plenty in the past, but they’ve always been one-item, one-price. This summer, I want to make a ‘normal’ vending machine that also happens to be entirely mechanical and transparent. I have most of the individual parts sketched, but I still need to formalize how they’re going to work together, determine the parts and budget, and actually build the thing. As I don’t have a good track record with series on my blog, I wont’t promise that I’ll write about the whole process. I will definitely write about it at the end, though.

Various accessibility things

I’m of course still working this summer, which means that I’ll still have accessibility on my mind all the time and I’ll still attend conferences and whatnot. Therefore, I’ll also continue making incremental improvements to this site/capsule and I’ll likely continue writing articles about ideas I think are interesting.

The current accessibility improvement I’m working on is a site search engine to cover WCAG SC 2.4.5 (Multiple Ways) conformance. The current version is available in /cgi-bin/. My Current Gemini server doesn’t support CGI, so it’s only available over HTTPS right now. I will, of course, switch servers at some point in order to get it working over Gemini too.

References

DJ Chase; “DJ Chase’s Site”. 2022-10-13. //dj-chase.com/
DJ Chase; “dj-chase.com README”. 2022-06-10. “DJ Chase’s Site”; //dj-chase.com/meta/readme.gmi

Questions, comments, or wrote a reply? Email me.