2somethingFinally, after 16 months of effort, I have finished converting Pandora's Tale Wiki into a gemini capsule.
I've mentioned before that the entire wiki started as a single table, which listed all named characters and some unnamed characters in the first seven chapters.
I initially made it as a spreadsheet on my computer. I uploaded the table to Google sheets to share it, and I converted it into a wiki to update it. Everything else in the wiki came out of that table.
When I started converting the wiki to geminispace, I immediately ran into a hurdle: gemtext, the markup language of geminispace, does not support tables.
Over the past year, I attempted several hacks to get the tables from the MediaWiki version of the wiki into the new version. Each of those hacks suffered from at least one of the following three issues:
* It would be difficult for me to update,
* It was hard for people using screenreaders,
* The web proxy would have more features than the gemini capsule,
* It looked bad to me.
The opinion of many geminauts is that you should not use tables in geminispace. I considered early on whether it would be possible to reformat all the tables in the wiki using lists and subsections. However, I resisted the idea largely because it felt weird to purge all tables from PTW when the entire wiki started as a table.
Last night and this morning, however, I gave it a try. Every table in the entire wiki has been converted into ordinary gemtext lists, separated by section and subsection headers.
The result, when I use a gemini browser to look at the very first PTW article in its new format is...I kinda like it?!?
It isn't perfect, and I'll probably do some additional reformatting later, and there are likely even more tweaks I want to do to the web proxy, but the page does express the relevant information without any awkward hacks.
Now that I'm finally done with the transition (heh) to gemtext, I will shut down the legacy version of Pandora's Tale Wiki.
The new (and henceforth, only) version of Pandora's Tale Wiki is at
and proxied to
https://pandorastale.wiki
Thank you to @comicsbyxan for creating such an incredible world, and thanks to @avghelper for hosting the gemini capsule and source and making the wiki possible.
#GeminiProtocol #Geminispace #PandorasTaleWiki #Wikiverse
I've mentioned before that the entire wiki started as a single table, which listed all named characters and some unnamed characters in the first seven chapters.
I initially made it as a spreadsheet on my computer. I uploaded the table to Google sheets to share it, and I converted it into a wiki to update it. Everything else in the wiki came out of that table.
When I started converting the wiki to geminispace, I immediately ran into a hurdle: gemtext, the markup language of geminispace, does not support tables.
Over the past year, I attempted several hacks to get the tables from the MediaWiki version of the wiki into the new version. Each of those hacks suffered from at least one of the following three issues:
* It would be difficult for me to update,
* It was hard for people using screenreaders,
* The web proxy would have more features than the gemini capsule,
* It looked bad to me.
The opinion of many geminauts is that you should not use tables in geminispace. I considered early on whether it would be possible to reformat all the tables in the wiki using lists and subsections. However, I resisted the idea largely because it felt weird to purge all tables from PTW when the entire wiki started as a table.
Last night and this morning, however, I gave it a try. Every table in the entire wiki has been converted into ordinary gemtext lists, separated by section and subsection headers.
The result, when I use a gemini browser to look at the very first PTW article in its new format is...I kinda like it?!?
It isn't perfect, and I'll probably do some additional reformatting later, and there are likely even more tweaks I want to do to the web proxy, but the page does express the relevant information without any awkward hacks.
Now that I'm finally done with the transition (heh) to gemtext, I will shut down the legacy version of Pandora's Tale Wiki.
The new (and henceforth, only) version of Pandora's Tale Wiki is at
gemini://pandorastale.wikiand proxied to
https://pandorastale.wiki
Thank you to @comicsbyxan for creating such an incredible world, and thanks to @avghelper for hosting the gemini capsule and source and making the wiki possible.
#GeminiProtocol #Geminispace #PandorasTaleWiki #Wikiverse
b-unicyling
Anja Gerber
Christian Erlinger
Alexander Winkler
NFDI4Objects
Siobhan Leachman
pandorastalewiki