Friday, August 17th, 2018
On GopheRing
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Again, many weeks passed since I posted anything here, but what are
some weeks in gopher history? Now there is a topic, I have something
to add to, so sit down, put on your reading glasses and let's start.
This week I finally managed to get a decent internet connection to
our current living place, so I could do a bit of gopher browsing.
I came across Tomasino's post[1] about gopher rings and I have to say,
I too have fond memories of webrings and I would like to see something
like them on gopher as well.
You see, webrings were better than fulltext search, because they were
managed. Fulltext search, no matter how well designed and intelligent,
is still just a search - it can return irrelevant pages, just because
they contain some words. Managed webring, that was tied to some topic,
usually offered both relevant and current content. I loved that, even
though that was the cause of death of webrings: as the web grew,
nobody had the time to manage more and more and more pages and
fulltext became better than it was, though never perfect.
But a year ago, when I created Bongusta!, webrings crossed my mind.
That's why I bother to manually manage the phlog list, to wait few
weeks or even months before adding newbies and to delete non-working
or no longer updated phlogs.I wanted it to be as good as webrings once
were, to be the showcase of what gopherspace currently is, just as
webrings once were the showcase of their particular interest fields.
And today, with adding another three phlogs to the list, I added one
feature of webrings, that I missed most - Exit to random phlog. The
menu item is in my top-level gopher menu, so any random gopher
wanderer can find it. It was just few lines of bash scripting and for
me the feeling is now complete. Webrings won't come back from the
death, long live the GopheRing!
[1]
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20180811-gopher-rings
