"BBS The Documentary" from Jason Scott1 showed me a world I never touched, never experienced - Eastern Europe and dial up in the 80s... we didn't even have a phone line until the early 90s at home. So I eagerly started digging on how to set up a BBS, to at least get a minor feel from the time of WarGames2, only to realize, I'd most probably need to write the whole thing from scratch. Not that is wouldn't be fun, but it wouldn't be enough fun.
Soon I forgot about it, until about week ago an unusual entry popped up on Hacker News3: We must revive Gopherspace4 - from 2017.
The basis of the entry describes how ugly the web has become with all the tracking, ads, attention driven social media, an puts it in constast with the purity of Gopher. HTTP and HTML are absolutely fantastic pieces of engineering - but indeed they became bloated and abused. Gopher on the other hand, is time travel, to a time when a global network was completely new.
After reading a bit about the Gopher protocol5, I have to say: of course it's pure, it needs to be compared with HTTP 1.0 and HTML 1, because it never got a 2.0. It certainly has that oldschool feeling of following links around, finding bottomless servers that has been sitting around for 20+ years with content.
I wanted to contribute to this tiny community of literally just hundreds of servers around the world.
The Python script6 I generate my website with uses
markdown source content files and Pandoc7
creates nice HTML out of them. Apparently it can also create 80 columns
wrapped plain text just as easily. Setting up pygopherd8 is pretty straightforward as
well.
The only difference from the docs you might find in case of
pygopherd is that the gophermap files don't
need the i in front of ordinary text content.
An example snippet:
petermolnar.net's gopherhole - phlog, if you prefer
1article /category/article petermolnar.net 70
1journal /category/journal petermolnar.net 70
1note /category/note petermolnar.net 70
1photo /category/photo petermolnar.net 70will look like:
or
article - petermolnar.net
0A journey to the underworld that is RDF /web-of-the-machines/index.txt petermolnar.net 70
I got into an argument on Twitter - it made me realize I don’t know
enough about RDF to argue about it. Afterwards I tried out a lot of
different ways to drew my own conclusions on RDF(a), microdata, JSON-LD,
vocabularies, schema.org, etc. In short: this one does not spark joy.
Irdf-it-does-not-spark-joy /web-of-the-machines/rdf-it-does-not-spark-joy.jpg petermolnar.net 70
Igsdtt_microdata_error_01 /web-of-the-machines/gsdtt_microdata_error_01.png petermolnar.net 70
Igsdtt_microdata_error_02 /web-of-the-machines/gsdtt_microdata_error_02.png petermolnar.net 70
Igsdtt_rdfa_error_01 /web-of-the-machines/gsdtt_rdfa_error_01.png petermolnar.net 70
Igsdtt_rdfa_error_02 /web-of-the-machines/gsdtt_rdfa_error_02.png petermolnar.net 70
0How to add themes to your website with manual and CSS prefers-color-scheme support /os-theme-switcher-css-with-fallback/index.txt petermolnar.net 70
prefers-color-scheme is a new CSS media query feature, which propagates
your OS level color preference. While it’s very nice, it’s way too new
There are good guides out there for setting up gopher content9, there is really no need for one more, but if you do have any questions, feel free to get in touch.
(Oh, by the way: this entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.)
