(2023-04-03) Finally here
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So, it finally happened. I'm really starting my journey to Gopherspace.
I have a bad habit of writing all the tooling I can't find myself, and for
this journey, I came prepared - several authoring scripts, another script to
put it all together and... two fucking DIY Gopher clients, one for Bash and
another for KaiOS. And I can proudly say that Bopher-NG is currently more
comfortable to use than Lynx, and that Kopher is much more usable than the
stock KaiOS 2.5.x browser.
I also happen to have a few J2ME-enabled phones so I tested Pocket Gopher on
them as well. Although obviously not thoroughly designed as Kopher, my user
experience with PG definitely beats Opera Mini or whatever else "large Web"
capabilities they tried to shove into such phones. I liked this piece of
software very much, it really shows the potential of Gopher becoming the
next WAP if someone wanted to.
For the server, I'm planning to write my own someday too. In Bash + xinetd,
of course. But for the time being, I'm using gofor-lx.py, a modified version
of gofor.py by yam655. Why modified? Because in my coordinate system of
values, the directory Gophermap should be called index.map and not just
lowercase gophermap, so I made gofor.py look for that name instead. I also
removed all the "smartness" from the map generation process, I want it to be
served exactly the way I prepare it. I can look after fields, CRLFs and
trailing dots myself.
That's it for now. Over the time, I'll be migrating whatever mess I made on
my happynetbox landing page to this hole and let that landing page be what
it's supposed to be, just a landing page. By the way, I really thank HNB
admin(s) for allowing me to experiment with everything I could until I set
up this one, and not banning me for ANSI code styling or concealing their
tailing ad. Now, it's time to go standalone. And more interesting content is
coming here soon.
