Yuturna is intended to be a community in the fashion of old pubnix (public access UNIX) servers, offering web and gemini hosting.
A pubnix is a UNIX-based distribution that is open to public access, usually through secure shell (SSH). Historically, the tilde (~) has been used to access a user’s content (i.e.: example.com/~user), and that is the convention followed here.
The Gemini protocol is separate from the World Wide Web, and aims to be a lighter alternative to it. Gemini capsules (sites in geminispace) are purely text-based; though images and other media can be served and downloaded, not all Gemini browsers display them). There is no CSS, and no Javascript.
The web is bloated with ads and noxious website design. Yuturna and other similar sites aim to be a respite from this. It offers an experience of simplicity through content created and curated by people instead of corporations.
Should you want to host your content at Yuturna, send an email to admin@yuturna.com with:
Create an SSH key pair (search the web for how to use the built-in SSH client if you’re on Windows or Mac). Run:
ssh-keygen
When prompted, you may want to set a password for the private key, especially if the device you’re using is shared, or if someone may otherwise have access to the private key. Open the resulting ‘.pub’ file (this is the public key) and paste its contents into the email, along with your username.
You’ll get a reply when your account is set up on the server (hopefully within a day or two). Then you can run:
ssh username@yuturna.com
and you’ll be logged in! You should see a message like:
===================
Welcome to Yuturna!
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In your home directory on the server, there will be a directory called ‘public’, and two directories below that called ‘html’ and ‘gemtext’, where the web and gemini servers, respectively, will serve your content from. These would be the places to put your index.html and index.gmi files, and you can keep building from there. You should see your content at ‘yuturna.com/~username’.
The site’s terminology is loosely themed around Lake Diuturna, from Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun”, where the lake people live on floating islands. Each user’s site is thus termed an “island”. It would be great if you decide to use this terminology, at least as a brief reference to the main site/capsule. Likewise, feel free to use the ‘style.css’ from the main page, if you enjoy the look of it.
Please include a link back to yuturna.com somewhere in your site/capsule’s index, so that visitors may easily discover other islands.
You’re welcome to publish content in any language, and about any subject.
You get 100M of disk space. Hopefully you will find it quite comfortable if you limit your content to pure text as much as possible.
How you get your files onto the server, or whether you create them from within the server itself, is up to you.
You have the choice of ‘vim’ or ‘nano’ as text editors (you may want to go with nano if you’ve never used vim).
You may sync your files from your device with a file transfer tool like ‘rsync’, or SSH’s ‘scp’.
You might consider writing your content in Markdown, since it converts directly to HTML, and is very similar to gemtext (the markup language used for geminispace).
‘lowdown’ is a handy Markdown translator capable of converting Markdown files to a variety of markup languages, including HTML and gemtext. It is available on the server. Type ‘man lowdown’ for how to use it.
You may communicate with users from other islands with the ‘mail’ command, directly on the server. Of course, you may also check if they’ve published their contact info.