2026-05-10

🛠️ Projects

Software forge

In software development, you need to write code, but above all to share it. There are many solutions for this, the vast majority working in a centralised way: you need an account on a single platform managed by {a company/a collective/a person in a garage and the three rats running on a wheel to power the server}.

Besides the issues of digital sovereignty, which alone deserve entire books, the recent outages of GitHub and of the main instance of one of the free forges, Codeberg (based on ForgeJo), make it increasingly necessary to ensure decentralised code availability.

I mention later in this note that I had taken an interest in the ForgeFed project, which allows a multitude of code hosting servers to talk to each other, thus forming a distributed and democratic solution.

One of the existing projects showing a certain maturity is Radicle. It is a software forge running entirely peer-to-peer, therefore without a centralised entity.

I installed a radicle-node replication node on rad.vit.am. You can see the hosted code through the new link available in the header of this site (did you notice it? 😛), namely here.

I still have quite a few projects to migrate to radicle, and I’m not sure I’ll publish all of them there. One is often a bit ashamed of code written a year earlier.

To be honest: radicle remains a bit “rough” for beginners. Most operations are done on the command line and require a good understanding of git, although a graphical application was recently developed. We are far from a project as polished and battle-tested as GitHub. But the effort is beautiful and promising.

More to follow, then.

Converting this site to a Gemini capsule

This site is generated by Zola from text files following a particular but simple format, markdown.

Zola converts these markdown files, images and other assets into HTML files, ready to be received and understood by your web browser which will display a web page, according to the HTML file instructions.

The Gemini protocol is a somewhat different approach to the web. The idea remains to present textual content to a user, but without all the frills of the modern web. No ads, no videos that start playing when the page loads, no 1001 trackers reporting all your actions and user profile to whoever pays the most, etc.

Zola cannot generate anything other than HTML. Zola is also quite complex because of the need to generate HTML.

In the past, I wrote Nautica, which is a piece of code that converts markdown files into gemtext files (.gmi, the file format used by the Gemini protocol).

I therefore started writing mirbeau, which will eventually be able to create a Gemini capsule (equivalent of a website) from a website managed by Zola.

Preview cards via OpenGraph

I tried to implement preview cards on this site. You know, those little “business cards” that show up when you post a link on social networks. I did everything properly according to the documentation I could find to implement the correct OpenGraph declarations, but mastodon, which I used for my tests, refused to show a preview. It was a bit frustrating.

I eventually found where the problem came from: the SSL certificate, managed by Let’s Encrypt(LE), was in fact not managed by LE at all, yet still valid for some unknown reason. A quick run of certbot and it worked. I think the difference in behaviour between browsers and some websites comes from the freshness of the root certificates embedded on servers.

👀 Discovered

I took quite an interest in the various software components of the Fediverse. I’ve been on Mastodon for a while already but I find it a bit too heavy for my tastes. I didn’t find any existing server software that meets my expectations so I’ll stick with mastodon. For now, at least. Nonetheless I (re-)discovered the existence of the ForgeFed project, which would allow federating the various software forges existing everywhere. That would remove a real barrier to leaving GitHub. It seems that the implementation is underway on the ForgeJo side.

I had the very pleasant surprise of discovering Wander, a different approach to discovery than what webrings offer (where one site recommends another, which recommends another, which recommends another and so on until returning to the initial site). A bit like my Links page, the Wander console will ask the other Wander consoles it finds for the list of sites recommended by the site’s author. Thus, a tree of individual recommendations is created, which you can browse. A simple idea but an execution I find elegant. I will probably try to add language restriction support, to allow French-speaking “wanderers” with limited English to still wander.

📺 Watched

I didn’t watch anything, officer. 🙈

📖 Read

• Eco-conception and dithering (French), which demonstrates that dithering, a technique to lighten an image by reducing the amount of visual information composing it (example), is actually not very useful compared to other far less destructive techniques for reducing image size. Thanks to @Altay@mastodon.social for the link.
• The boring Internet by Terry Godier a reminder that even after capitalist colonisation, the heart of the Internet still exists.

🎧 Listened to

• Ferrum Sidereum by Zu, a solid album of innovative prog by the Italian masters. Featuring a duck saxophone on vocals.
• I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed by Thank, an excellent album of punkish English noise rock.

🎮 Played

Still on Factorio, where I reached the planet Vulcanus, a hell covered in molten lava. Lava from which you extract the game’s metals in large quantities. Incidentally, the Vulcanus soundtracks are my favourites in the game. Here is an excerpt: