________ ________ ________
2018-02-07 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
At times I find being part of a highly- / _/ / /
technical community a little frustrating. \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
While I am interested in software and / \/ \/ / \
technology I'm far more interested in the / _/ /_ _/
people involved, so to me post after post of /- / _/ /
dry hardware catalogs and software \________/\________/\___/____/
preferences can get a bit tedious.
That is of course completely subjective and by no means me trying to impose
on anyone to do anything but what they want to do, I'm certain there are a lot
of people in the gopher community that find my scattered, long-winded lifelogs
just as, if not more tiresome.
The flip side of that is that being part of a technically minded community
means shit really gets done and there's no finer example at the moment than
the phlogosphere listings.
After launching gopher.club some changes were made to the phlogs listing on
SDF and they were no longer ordered based on when they were last listed by the
phlog owner, instead they were ordered by last edit, meaning anyone who did
anything to their gopher directory whether it was a phlog post or not was
bumped to the top and now they're ordered alphabetically.
There was some grumbling of course but there were a lot of people just
diving right in and rolling up alternatives to the phlogosphere list. Ulcer's
top list[1] was the first I saw, with a straight up replacement for the
existing list and I've seen a shorter, monthly-list from auzymoto[2] and a
neat list from slugmax[3] that returns the 40 most recent phlogs, based on
updates to a gopher hole's root gophermap.
More outside-the-box is kensanata's Moku Pona[4] which essentially lets you
nominate a list of gopher spaces to monitor for updates and returns a list of
them ordered by most recently updated, kind of like a user-configurable
bongusta. I think this one is especially interesting because you could add
gopher holes from anywhere in gopherspace, not just the SDF gopher.club.
Finally, worth a read is tomasino's ideas for an aggregator[5] which
outlines the requirements for what sounds like the perfect aggregator. What
particularly stood out for me is checking for phlog's gophermap, similar to
slugmax's list and having the link in the aggregator link to the post itself,
rather than the user's gopher space. Ideally you could even nominate a submap
to monitor. My phlog's gopher space is set up in such a way that the gophermap
file just pulls together a handful of submaps; one for the fancy header and
description, one for the list of phlogs and one for the "back to" link, so if
it could be worked that a change would only register if the phlogs list
gophermap was updated then it'd avoid, at least in my case, my phlog
registering as being updated when all I'm doing is fiddling with the layout.
I've got no idea about the logistics of that, just thinking out loud.
Anyway, to conclude; I agree that it's a real bummer that the
phlogosphere/gopher.club list is a mess right now but you really can't be mad
when, as a result so many interesting things are going on.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/ulcer/toplist
[2]
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/auzymoto/
[3]
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/slugmax/cgi-bin/recently_updated_gophers.cgi
[4]
gopher://alexschroeder.ch/02018-02-05_Moku_Pona
[5]
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20180206-ideas-for-an-aggregator
EOF