## 05 Back in a TUI world

In my desire to simplify and lighten my internet, I'm looking at some of the lesser known 'corners' of the web like sdf.org and all the tilde sites. It's also a non-commercial approach to the internet, a place where sharing is more important than making money. But for someone like me, a former Apple fan and Graphical User Interface (GUI) user, it's not easy because it uses SSH, Unix command lines and Text-based User Interface (TUI). I'm not completely stupid and I have memories of command lines, especially in bash (I sometimes write some scripts for myself or for work), but in the era of mouse and keyboard it seems very anachronistic to me.

I had old (bad??) souvenirs from VI and Man, but for my first trip into this world I had to use PiCo (Pine Composer) or Nano. Not very powerful, but I managed to do what I wanted. I'm just thinking about the fans of the touch user interface (not another TUI ??!) with just a keyboard and that black and white window, ha ha. And I'm also thinking of fans of CLI who just want to work with a keyboard. I'm open-minded, so I'm always thinking of the different users, trying my site with Lynx (a text browser) or with Firefox or Opera mobile. I discovered the SDF.og bulletin board, which reminds me of the old BBS or the French Minitel. It's quite easy to learn. But when I had to use Mutt as a mail client, it was not so easy for the first few minutes. After a few aborted attempts, I managed to send an email to the poor sdf users who were trying to help me discover this "dark" world.

I prefer Thunderbird or webmail for mail because of the ease of cutting and pasting. But with some training Mutt is a good tool, with a good text editor and .... a validated account with all the functionalities. The interest of these sites for me is not only to learn about TUI, but to host draft versions of a site, to host gemini or gopher versions of my blog...and maybe more. I don't know what I'll choose at the end of the year, but it seems to be a very good solution for a quicker internet (because of the text based websites...but for slower networks ). It's by testing many tools and many ways that I will find the best for me. I'm just testing this new blog here for a few months before the real start in 2024.

It's weird, since I've been using TUI again, I feel like a younger guy. I even used an IRC client. I haven't done that for at least 17 or 18 years. It was a different experience to the one I had in my souvenirs. So quiet, because older people I guess, and much much less, too. I'm so shy in this kind of thing... A younger, very young boy, ha ha. Young because I don't feel legitimate, the impostor syndrome, as always. I've learnt so much on my own, but in France it doesn't help much in the workplace because it's always the diploma first, then the skills. I had the same syndrome for many years in my work in metrology, because I learn most by myself, looking at the best practices of everyone, the mistakes of some experts, etc... Now, at TUI, I have to experiment a lot by myself, sometimes to learn from my mistakes. The funny thing is that sometimes it is difficult to quit a programme or an application.

So now I've decided to stop using gemlog.blue and just use the sdf.org gemini server. It's so easy to upload my gmi files, just a copy of my md files. I'm now thinking of some older posts from my French site that might be interesting to translate and put in the future archive. But I need to think about the structure of the files. My HTML site now seems so complex after using the Gemini capsule (it would be the same with Gopher, of course). The main thing I don't like is the lack of bold and italics in the gemtext format. But now I understand the bloggers who convert their old html blog to Gemini Capsule or close it down. Ok, it's like raw food in the kitchen... But this is what I wanted to do for several years. I'm writing with a GUI now, but I could do it from my smartphone (I made some corrections with it in this post) with markor and put it on the gemini server with ssh or sftp. So simple... And I don't care about statistics and all that egocentric stuff. Just the pleasure of sharing and sometimes discuss
ing from blog to blog. My HTML site also took a lot of hours, so I'm going to keep it. I just have to decide where. Just to have in mind that for the same 5 posts and pages of this site, it's 20ko for gemini/gopher and 100ko for html...Imagine with a CMS, ah, ah.

Now my new problem is about https and SSL certificates. It seems to be an obligation for Web 2.0, but I'm not in that mood and neither are the majority of sdf.org users. Most of the modern brothers, proxies and web tools want https ... My usual htaccess file didn't work on one of my attempts and I don't understand why. I've got time to fix it.

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