Today I was on a serious hunt for plaintext content. It all started with writing most of a Project Gutenberg to Gopher proxy using commandline PHP and the 7 (search) data type in gopher. Then after my first use of curl, there in the harvested sourcecode was: "do not use this page for scraping. Seriously." Which led me to read their terms of use -- these guys really don't want to be funneled through another site... So I downloaded their RDF file, all 259MB of it. My poor Raspberry Pi choked on two different libraries trying to utilize it, and I just do not feel like parsing it into a mySQL DB. --more--
So I wrote the CEO of Project Gutenberg about the passionate, albeit small, community of persons who hang out on the gopher protocol. Saying it would be trivial to port their existing database to gopher, and the cost would be essentially nill due to low traffic. However, the gesture would be huge. Yeah, I do not expect a reply.
Then on to find websites that are text only that have content that I could broker a deal to funnel into gopher space... yep, not a bit. I remember (not too long ago) when most sites offered a text-only view. Not the case in current year.
I think that Cameron on floodgap must have found the only extent text only feeds for news, or else he parses them out himself. Everytime I get on the web, I find myself noping-out of site after site as my screen dims and a CSS box glides to the center, or the page finishes its load and ads choke the content.
Who clicks on these? No one. WTF is the point? I actually bought a facebook ad years ago, to promote one of my bands. Almost all the people who liked my page were fake. No interaction with myself or the content. Money wasted. If I saw that ad, I'd refuse to listen to the band on general principle. "Screw you, and your ad, buddy!"
Anyways, if anyone even reads this phlog, and you happen to know of some good sites with text only designs and good content, leave a comment and tell me about it.
