Tips and Tricks

Here are some useful recommendations to improve your Flounder & Gemini experience.

Home page

Your home page is served by a your file named "index.gmi". If this does not exist, your home page will be a directory listing of all your files.

Use folders

By editing a new file with a / in it, Flounder will automatically create a subfolder for that file. Folders will list all the files contained within them, or redirect to an "index.gmi" file, if it exists.

Gemlogs

By creating a "gemlog" folder, you can aggregate new content in a way that uses can subscribe to, either on the /feed page, using a Gemini fed parser, or via an atom.xml reader. For more information:

gemfeed.gmi

.hidden folder

If you're working on a draft or other content you aren't ready to share publicly, put it inside the .hidden folder, and it won't show up on any feeds or be viewable publicly.

SFTP Access

sftp.gmi

Finger

Flounder supports the finger protocol. Edit the plaintext file called ".plan" and it will be served at (yourname@flounder.online)

Limits

This server is configured with the following limits:

Max file size: 1MB
Max user space: 10MB
Max file count: 1024

If these are constraining to you for some reason, let me know and I can consider an increase. For large images, consider compressing it with a tool such as:

https://doodad.dev/dither-me-this/

https://imagemagick.org/index.php

Linking sites you like

While Flounder will link to everyone's site, it is only a small part of the Gemini space. If you find a Gemini site that you like, on or off flounder, make sure to link it on your page. This allows people to "browse" the Gemini network, much like on the old school web.

Provide a contact link

If you want people to be able to contact you or follow you on other social media, you may want to provide a link in your page. An email is especially helpful if you want people to provide feedback to any of your posts.

To communicate publicly with other Flounder users or discuss the Flounder project, check out the mailing list:

/mailing-list.gmi

If you want people to be able to comment publicly on your posts, a mailing list is a great way to do that. Sourcehut (the service linked above) is an easy way to set one up.

robots.txt

You can add a special file named robots.txt to your page. This will inform web-crawlers, for example, search engines, how to treat your page. It will not block them from crawling your page, but well behaved crawlers will respect it. For example, if you don't want your web page archived by Google, Internet Archive, or anyone else, add the following to your robots.txt: