Inspired by Bongusta, I wrote a simple Gopher aggregator using Perl
and called it moku pona which is toki pona for good food, or tasty,
in other words a translation of Bongusta.
Take a look: moku pona sources & documentation.
Its output is a gopher menu you can browse yourself or host
publically. It looks a bit like the Recent Changes of a wiki. New
items show up at the top and disappear from the bottom so everybody is
just mentioned once.
Here’s how I added everybody who has posted to Gopher Club in 2018:
Then I clicked through them all, trying to see whether they were
actually active, and whether I felt I might want to read some more,
and removed the little comments for each username, and here we are:
What about Bongusta, asks logout. I don’t know. Bongusta was the
first site where I saw phlogs from outside SDF. That was very
important for me, and I imagine it will remain important in the
future. Having a well known starting point is important.
Plus, if gopherspace grows, we will soon run into preferences. Perhaps
I would like to avoid this phlog or that phlog, or I’ll want to add a
phlog that somebody else doesn’t want to add. The freedom to do
different is important to me, even if there is no immediate need for
it right now.
It’s cool to have a tool that enables people to run their own
aggregators without people feeling like they need to. It’s like any
other freedom: you are free to service your own car, but you are also
free to take a cab, or hitch a ride, or anything else. How many
different kinds of public aggregators will we need in a world where 28
of 36 phlogs I follow are on SDF and I guess the total number of sites
I might be interested in is not much more than that? One? Two? Three?
Not much more than that is my guess. And that’s why Bongusta
absolutely has a place, even if there are tools that enable other
people to run similar sites. So, having the freedom to run an
aggregator is super cool, even if there is just a need to run one or
two.
And then there’s auzymoto’s post talking about two kinds of
subscriptions: subscribe to changes to a gophermap like moku pona
does. or actually spider a site and look for changes. Auzymoto also
lists some pitfalls for this: links leaving the site, circular links,
stuff like that. And I’d also think about all the false positives I
can see. I’m not interested in all the new links, I think. I’m just
looking for new day posts. Perhaps a possible compromise is to
subscribe to gophermaps and list any addition to that gopher map in
the aggregated view? It would only work one or two levels deep, I
guess. Perhaps that is limited enough for it work.
