2022-11-30 - (pointlessly) converted certs, added nav links

I figured out how to convert my Let’s Encrypt key and cert from PEM to DER¹. My main motivation for this was due to the complaint one of the Gemini clients made upon connection, (I think it was gmni?) and I assumed having a certificate that was signed by a trusted certificate authority would help, but the client complained again with the new key and certificate.

In hindsight, it kind of makes sense. If the certificate has already been accepted by the client and the client saves it, it should complain if someone tries to swap it for a new key. The server (Agate) created a key with an extremely long expiration date. I don’t know if it’s at any higher risk for being compromised because it will be used for so long, but if you’re NOT relying on a certificate authority and delegating your trust, it seems like it would be good enough to just be sure the certificate you have been trusting hasn’t been swapped out.

I’m going to start looping some of my other notes into the capsule soon, but next time I’ll probably talk about my system setup. The main motivation for this being that I really like hearing about work flows and system configurations that other people use, so I suppose this is a sort of pre-emptive reciprocity.

There’s probably not much of heavy use in my other notes, but putting them in the capsule will give me a good place to be able to review them at random, and who knows, maybe there will be some value in them for others.

But first, what’s left from yesterday’s TODO items…

Mastodon post for user feedback

embed some navigation links in the page

maybe preserve tags

automate the Mastodon posting because I’m lazy

I still need to find a Mastodon server, but it looks like there are a few command-line clients to choose from that I could slurp up in my build chain. I just need to figure out how to test for a post existing already and then create one if it doesn’t exist

As for links, I have seen some sites that use a link back to the root domain, so maybe I’ll start stamping pages with one of those… but I haven’t yet decided how I want to structure my note inclusion or the use of tags, so I can’t really add that yet.

In my experiments to group by tag, I was generating word clouds that linked to a giant page of all the posts under a given tag. I’m not sure a mile of duplicate posts per tag is all that useful, but since I have to review notes before posting, maybe it will grow slowly enough that a better organizational method will just emerge from the process. In the mean time, I suppose I could start stamping note pages with the tags they incorporate, and then later change those to a list of links.

Edit: It seems part of my conversion process is eating intentionally formatted code blocks. I had to make a last minute substitution of md2gemini in place of the Lua filter I was using previously. But this also means I can throw away the preprocessing that eliminates the 80-character word wrap and converts link file extensions to gmi and just use md2gemini for all of it.

Footnotes

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For reference, the commands to convert PEM cert and key to DER via the openssl command:

# command for converting a cert
openssl x509 -in cert.pem -outform DER -out cert.der

# command for converting a key
openssl rsa -inform PEM -in key.pem -outform DER -out key.der

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2022-11-30 - (pointlessly) converted certs, added nav links

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