Monday, July 05, 2021
A reimplementation of a web idea in Gemini
Way back in the day,
“ping servers” were popular and I added support for it to mod_blog,
only to remove it a few years later when the one I was using
(the most well known one—I think it was weblogs.com but it's been over fifteen years or so)
stopped working.
I then removed the support from mod_blog because I didn't feel it was worth keeping a feeature around I didn't use.
Then about a week or so ago,
a similar service just started up for Gemini based blogs,
and given that I serve up my blog via Gemini I figured I could support that feature again.
But as I started,
I had an idea—instead of hardcoding support for Antenna in mod_blog,
why not support the idea of a “hook”
(like git)?
It would be easier to write a script to update Antenna
(since I already support TLS and Gemini URLs
in Lua)
than to try to do that all in C.
It wasn't that hard. One function to execute a script and some judicious calls to said function and I have a way to notify external services of new updates.
I wish I had thought of this concept back then. It would have saved me the trouble of adding, and later, removing, code to support various notification sites as they came and went.
Ah well … live and learn.
