GopherProxy

	publishing-guideline.txt - gopher-tutorials - The gopher tutorials project.
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	publishing-guideline.txt (3117B)
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	1 This document will give you a few hints about publishing through
	2 gopher.
	3
	4 Line length
	5 ===========
	6
	7 The rendering of content is client specific. However most clients
	8 will present the user with a text based interface, so you should be
	9 conservative on the maximum line length in your menus. As clients
	10 will add a couple of characters to mark item types, a line width of
	11 69 characters is recommended.
	12
	13 The menu
	14 ========
	15
	16 The main entry point and user interface between your readers and your
	17 content is the gopher menu item (item '1' as you may recall). The
	18 selectors in a menu will define the information hierarchy. Choose a
	19 flat hierarchy if you can so readers will get to the content easily
	20 and without traversing too many menus.
	21
	22 Use helpful item descriptions for your selectors, this will aid both
	23 human and nonhuman readers: indexers will most likely index menu
	24 items only. Be as specific as possible. If it is a binary item type
	25 hint at its intended format, so your readers will know what to
	26 expect. Using a useful filename scheme for selectors is also helpful.
	27
	28 You may decorate your menus with informational items (item 'i').
	29 Clients will display them as is without additional tags. Around the
	30 gopherspace a lot of ASCII art is used to create a pleasant
	31 appearance of a gopher site. Some services also include explanations
	32 for the specific menu, and use 'i' items for grouping selectors.
	33
	34 There are clients that do not offer a 'back' button. Be kind to those
	35 users and provide navigational selectors in your menus. Make the
	36 journey through your gopher space easy!
	37
	38 On your travels through gopher sites, you will encounter gopher sites
	39 that use menu and informational items to mimick a page with embedded
	40 links. There is an ongoing dispute whether this is good style. We do
	41 not recommend this style as it delutes the meaning of the menu item.
	42 For starters you should stick to single file items to store your
	43 content. Once you gain more experience with publishing content in
	44 gopher you can always change your mind later!
	45
	46 Selector hierarchy
	47 ==================
	48
	49 By design a gopher site should present a hierarchy of content
	50 selectors to the user. These mimick a file system by intention.
	51 However this does not need to mtch the real hierarchy of your storage
	52 filesystem. An example:
	53
	54 Alicia has a gopher blog (aka 'phlog'). She writes daily posts. To
	55 make it easy on her users she has a menu item on the phlog/ selector
	56 that presents the latest 5 posts and a selector to an archive menu
	57 linking to all her posts. On disk however both the menus and the
	58 articles reside in the same directory. A script creates the
	59 selectors in the menu files and rotates them. The post files however
	60 remain untouched and their selectors will not change over time. This
	61 means that external links to her post will still be valid later.
	62
	63 Site generators
	64 ===============
	65
	66 The easiest creation of content is done manually. If you would like
	67 to automate some task then there are site generators. Most of these
	68 consists of a collection of shell scripts you can adapt to your
	69 needs. Search veronica for cl-yag or burrow for starters.