2026-03-30 Re: Silly standards: fursona schema (and gemini frustrations)
Sleepycrow (Cass) mentioned a, well, lesser-known `.well-known` schema for fursonas yesterday:
Sleepycrow's post over at smol.pub
The timing was impeccable, since I was literally updating my âaboutâ page on here with some fuzzier details only the day before.
Gemini is neat in itself, but it is also a perfect place to do things that don't really matter other than that they're fun. So of course, I promptly added a `.well-known/fursona` to my gemini server. Only to discover that while the schema explicitly acknowledges the gemini protocol, both Sleepycrow's implementation and the âofficialâ one only fetch files over http(s). So now my information is there, but it's irretrievable.
Of course that wasn't particularly satisfactory, so I tried to build my own test tool to fetch and present the information over gemini. But I'm originally a Lua guy, and I also wasn't really wanting to reinvent the internet wheel. Thankfully, there's a Lua library for gemini, called gemlib. Unfortunately, it defaults to TLS 1.2. My server only accepts TLS 1.3, so the library fails to connect. I've sent an e-mail to the author, but I guess I'll leave it at that for now.
I suppose I could've tried Python instead; surely there must be at least one library out there with TLS 1.3 support. But I felt like picking Lua back up again. It's been a while since I wrote anything in it at all. Maybe I'll try again in Python later. If I can find the time and motivation, I might even make it a CGI script and provide a gemini frontend on here. Could be a fun little thing (to screw up).
Next up on my plan is annoying the tech people by writing posts in non-English languages with no good way to serve a per-document `lang` property, and annoying the non-techies by mixing non-computer writing in with the tech stuff.
(No, manually setting the mime type of every non-English document in my server's configuration file is not âa good wayâ of declaring what language I'm writing a particular post in.)
Update 2026-04-01
Not an April fool's joke: I got a reply from the author of gemlib, who had already implemented a way of setting custom options for TLS â I just hadn't found them. Turns out it works, so now I'm looking at how much effort it would be to make my tiny script into a CGI âapplicationâ instead, accepting input and responding in gemtext. Scary.