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WHAT IS GOPHER AND GOPHERSPACE?
GOPHER is a network protocol that enables multiple servers
to create a single, uniform filesystem that transcends system
architecure and operating systems (GOPHERSPACE). With GOPHER,
information holds the most value. Since presentation is uniform
across GOPHERSPACE, the user does not encounter any challenges
in 'learning' a new site. Because of its simplicity and its
emphasis on the importance of informational texts, GOPHER is
ideal for those who are visually impared.
A GOPHER client can be called from SDF by typing 'gopher'. A URL
(Uniform Resource Locator) can be given as an argument. The client
itself is a document examiner. You can use it to search text documents
or download files. Clients under X11, Macintosh and other systems
can view pictures, and stream audio / video.
Many people think the http protocol has deprecated gopher, but that
just isn't true. Where do you think GOPHERs live? underground.
When you build your GOPHERSPACE on SDF, you are contributing to an
underground network of systems that still believe in the gopher
protocol. There is no commercialism, no banner ads, no spam, no
pop-up ads. GOPHER gives you what you want: information and files
(in any form) without the silliness of HTML and clumsiness of websites.
No HTML development is needed to contribute to GOPHERSPACE.. since
sites are uniform, all you need to do is upload or create your files.
HOW CAN I SETUP MY GOPHERSPACE?
This document was written with 'mkgopher' in mind. You may be
managing your space from the UNIX shell, but since 'mkgopher'
uses common UNIX commands, this should still be helpful.
SETUP
----
This will create the directory for the top level of your GOPHERSPACE.
Your URL will be "
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/username" (or
"
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/username") where 'username' is your UNIX
user id. During your 'mkgopher' session, this directory will be
present. If you don't create anyfiles or directories, the space
will be removed to keep our site clean.
NOTE: Unfortunately, most web browsers do not render gopher pages
properly, let alone grok Gopher URLs.
TITLE
-----
Your GOPHER URL is
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/login (or
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/login) where 'login' is the UNIX user id
you use to login to SDF. Your SITE name is your 'login'. Since that
is limited to 8 characters, you can use TITLE to set a 50 character
or less title for your site.
DESCRIBE
--------
For each directory you create in your GOPHERSPACE you can use the
DESCRIBE command to create a detailed description. This entry is
limited to 9 lines of roughly 50 characters per line.
MKDIR
-----
Create a subdirectory within your GOPHERSPACE.
RMDIR
-----
Remove a subdirectory within your GOPHERSPACE.
PICO
----
Edit and publish a document. You can also use this as a way to
cut and paste text from your computer terminal to SDF. ASCII upload
mode can also be used, just start sending text once you open the
editing buffer.
UPLOAD
------
This should be used for large text files or binary data that cannot
be transmitted via an ASCII transfer. UPLOAD uses the ZMODEM file
transfer protocol which some terminal emulators support (TeraTerm ..)
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Source code of a menu
Gopher menu items are defined by lines of tab-separated values in a text file.
This file is sometimes called a gophermap. As the source code to a gopher menu,
a gophermap is roughly analogous to an HTML file for a web page. Each
tab-separated line (called a selector line) gives the client software a
description of the menu item: what it is, what it is called, and where it leads
to. The client displays the menu items in the order that they appear in the
gophermap.
The first character in a selector line indicates the item type, which tells the
client what kind of file or protocol the menu item points to. This helps the
client decide what to do with it. Gopher's item types are a more basic
precursor to the media type system used by the Web and email attachments.
The item type is followed by the user display string (a description or label
that represents the item in the menu); the selector (a path or other string for
the resource on the server); the hostname (the domain name or IP address of the
server), and the network port.
All lines in a gopher menu are terminated by "CR + LF".
Example of a selector line in a menu source: The following selector line
generates a link to the "/home" directory at the subdomain gopher.floodgap.com,
on port 70. The item type of 1 indicates that the linked resource is a Gopher
menu itself. The string "Floodgap Home" is what the client will show to the
user when visiting the example menu.
1Floodgap Home /home gopher.floodgap.com 70
Item type User display string Selector Hostname Port
1 Floodgap Home /home gopher.floodgap.com 70
Item types
In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates what kind of
content the client should expect. This code may either be a digit or a letter
of the alphabet; letters are case-sensitive.
The technical specification for Gopher, RFC 1436, defines 14 item types. The
later gopher+ specification defined an additional 3 types.[24] A one-character
code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. Item type 3 is an
error code for exception handling. Gopher client authors improvised item types
h (HTML), i (informational message), and s (sound file) after the publication
of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape Navigator and early versions of Microsoft
Internet Explorer would prepend the item type code to the selector as described
in RFC 4266, so that the type of the gopher item could be determined by the url
itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these prefixes in their urls.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Canonical types
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 Text file
1 Gopher submenu
2 CCSO Nameserver
3 Error code returned by a Gopher server to indicate failure
4 BinHex-encoded file (primarily for Macintosh computers)
5 DOS file
6 uuencoded file
7 Gopher full-text search
8 Telnet
9 Binary file
+ Mirror or alternate server (for load balancing or in case of primary server downtime)
g GIF file
I Image file
T Telnet 3270
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gopher+ types
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
: Bitmap image
; Movie file
< Sound file
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Non-canonical types
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d Doc. Seen used alongside PDF and .doc files
h HTML file
i Informational message, widely used.[25]
p image file "(especially the PNG format)"
r document RTF file ("Rich Text Format")
s Sound file (especially the WAV format)
P PDF (Portable Document Format) file
X XML (Extensible Markup Language) file
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Here is an example gopher session where the user requires a gopher menu (/Reference on the first line):
/Reference
1CIA World Factbook /Archives/mirrors/textfiles.com/politics/CIA gopher.quux.org 70
0Jargon 4.2.0 /Reference/Jargon 4.2.0 gopher.quux.org 70 +
1Online Libraries /Reference/Online Libraries gopher.quux.org 70 +
1RFCs: Internet Standards /Computers/Standards and Specs/RFC gopher.quux.org 70
1U.S. Gazetteer /Reference/U.S. Gazetteer gopher.quux.org 70 +
iThis file contains information on United States fake (NULL) 0
icities, counties, and geographical areas. It has fake (NULL) 0
ilatitude/longitude, population, land and water area, fake (NULL) 0
iand ZIP codes. fake (NULL) 0
i fake (NULL) 0
iTo search for a city, enter the city's name. To search fake (NULL) 0
ifor a county, use the name plus County -- for instance, fake (NULL) 0
iDallas County. fake (NULL) 0
The gopher menu sent back from the server, is a sequence of lines each of which
describes an item that can be retrieved. Most clients will display these as
hypertext links, and so allow the user to navigate through gopherspace by
following the links.[5] This menu includes a text resource (itemtype 0 on the
third line), multiple links to submenus (itemtype 1, on the second line as well
as lines 4–6) and a non-standard information message (from line 7 on), broken
down to multiple lines by providing dummy values for selector, host and port.
External links
Historically, to create a link to a Web server, "GET /" was used as a
pseudo-selector to emulate an HTTP GET request.[26] John Goerzen created an
addition[27] to the Gopher protocol, commonly referred to as "URL links", that
allows links to any protocol that supports URLs. For example, to create a link
to
http://gopher.quux.org/, the item type is h, the display string is the title
of the link, the item selector is "URL:
http://gopher.quux.org/", and the domain
and port are that of the originating Gopher server (so that clients that do not
support URL links will query the server and receive an HTML redirection page).
Gopher+
Gopher+ is a forward compatible enhancement to the Gopher protocol. Gopher+
works by sending metadata between the client and the server. The enhancement
was never widely adopted by Gopher servers.[28][29][30] The client sends a tab
followed by a +. A Gopher+ server will respond with a status line followed by
the content the client requested. An item is marked as supporting Gopher+ in
the Gopher directory listing by a tab + after the port (this is the case of
some of the items in the example above).
Other features of Gopher+ include:
Item attributes, which can include the items
Administrator
Last date of modification
Different views of the file, like PostScript or plain text, or different languages
Abstract, or description of the item
Interactive queries
====================================================================================================
SZCZEŻUJA
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Setting a Gopher hole
=====================
As the beginning of the 2021 came through as setting a Gemini capsule,
the beginning of the 2022 is coming through as setting a Gopher
hole. I've decided to sign up for sdf.org account, because there is a
big gopher community and I didn't want to stuck in as some pioneer
somewhere else. So it should be easy thing to set up Gopher hole
there. No it wasn't so obvious.
My "setting" recipe
--------------------
The whole process of setting up a Gopher hole is easy, of course for
everyone who had set up earlier one. There aren't any special and
complicated software, there are only text files and Unix-like system.
As a model user I started from manual. I visited [SDF Gopher FAQ]
which can't be described as a very detailed source of knowledge. There
is reference for `mkgopher` internal command, which is helper for
doing so. So... I tried it. It confused me more, than it helped
me. After a while, I knew that I must make everything from command
line on my own. I noticed on [SDF Gopher Tutorial] two more
helpers. There is 'mkgopherentry' script and `phlog` command. First
one also confused me in creation of gophermap file (script's output is
a bit oddy). The second one was a bit mysterious, but finally I got
its purpose (it's only a trigger for linking on [Gopher Club Phlogs]).
So as I had written before, it's better to set your Gopher hole on
your own. But there are hidden traps, which aren't described in clear
way in FAQ or tutorial.
* You need a symlink from your home directory: `gopher ->
/ftp/pub/users/szczezuja`, which I made by 'mkgopher' command and by
calling "SETUP" inside it;
* You need some content, for example textfile, which you want to
publish on Gopher;
* You need to create a gophermap text file, which is pointing for that
content;
* You need to set up proper file permission in your home directory -
as described on [Slugmax SDF Gopher Tutorial]: `chmod o+r file`
(read for others) and `chmod g+r file` (read for group) and `chmod
o+rx directory`;
As [Ruari @ 2022-01-11 23:41] told me, the last point is specific for
sdf.org, and it's caused by default permissions on this server. But
it's good to know about it, because it is showing a simplicity of
Gopher servers. There are no a special layer of permissions, if you
are set "read for everyone" your files are public. In modern
web-servers era, we sometimes believe in some kind of magic which
would protect us. In the era of Gopher things were simpler.
Further thoughts
-----------------
It took me a while to settled gophermap topic in my mind. The whole
idea is also simple, but I was spoiled by `mkgopherentry` example
output. In the most cases we need only a little of the full
gophermap. And as I understand, part of the rest isn't a official
standard (so sometimes could be served in a different way in different
servers and clients). So as it's described in [Slugmax SDF Gopher
Tutorial]:
``
XSome text here<TAB>/path/to/content<TAB>example.org<TAB>N
Where X in most cases is 0 - for text files, and 1 - for
directories. And that's enough for gophermap, you don't need any
scripts for it.
For me the whole idea of content and gophermap is a bit fragile. One
mistaken character or permission, during the first or next uploads
could broke our Gopher hole. It could be hard to test all links. I
understand why many things in Gophersphere are broken.
But the most difficult part of Gopher protocol for today's user could
be lack of UTF-8. I don't think about emojis or other special
things. Rather about letters of non English alphabet (like "Z with
overdot" in "Szczezuja") or (which was also found in my articles)
characters like double typographic quotes.
Finally
-------
So I safely landed in Gophersphere. You can read my content at
[Szczezuja's Gopher hole]. I plan to publish there subset of articles
from Geminispace (via [Formatting Gemtext for Gopher] script) about
Gopher. It's aim to be closer to Gophersphere user, which could be not
interested in Gemini.
It wasn't so easy, but it's easy. For me easier was to set up Gemini
capsule.
====================================================================================================
SlugMax
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!Sample gophermap for Gophernicus
##
## This is a sample gophermap.
##
#
Creating a file called "gophermap" into a directory disables the
normal resource listing and replaces it with the contents of the map
file. You can also have inline gophermaps - files with a ".gophermap"
extension are parsed as gophermaps and displayed in between normal
resources in alphabetical order.
In a gophermap any line that doesn't contain a <TAB> character is
automatically converted to an type "i" gopher resource which are
displayed as plain text in the client. Lines which contain tabs are
intepreted as gopher resource lines which the client will render as
links. The first line of a gophermap should be a !Title line
describing the menu.
Dynamic gophermaps are possible by making the gophermap a script and
marking it as executable. All script output is parsed just like a
static gophermap, for example lines without tabs are converted to "i"
resources. Executable gophermaps are always ran through the default
shell (/bin/sh) so depending on your operating system that's either
slow, or really unbearably slow...
The format of a gophermap resource line is simple:
Xname<TAB>selector<TAB>host<TAB>port
Where:
X is the gopher filetype
name is an explanation of the resource
selector is the path to resource
host:port are the hostname and port number to go to
Type and name are mandatory. If you don't specify a selector, the
name field will be also used as the selector. If you don't specify
host or port the host:port of the current server are used instead.
Also make sure to use ONLY ONE TAB between the fields.
Valid filetypes include:
0 text file
1 directory
3 error message
5 archive file (zip, tar etc)
7 search query
8 telnet session
9 binary file
g GIF image
h HTML file
i info text
I generic image file (other than GIF)
d document file (ps, pdf, doc etc)
s sound file
; video file
c calendar file
M MIME file (mbox, emails etc)
Additional type characters supported by Gophernicus:
# comment - rest of the line is ignored
!title menu title (use on the first line)
-file hide the file from listings
:ext=type change filetype (for this directory only)
~ include a list of users with valid ~/public_gopher
% include a list of available virtual hosts
=mapfile include or execute other gophermap
* stop processing gophermap, include file listing
. stop processing gophermap (default)
Examples of valid resource lines:
1subdir
1Relative internal link subdir
1Absolute internal link /subdir
1External link / gopher.floodgap.com 70
1External relative link (which shouldn't work) subdir/ gopher.domain.dom 70
0Finger-to-gopher link kim holviala.com 79
hLink to a website URL:
http://www.google.com/
hLink to a local html page /path/to/file.html
5Link to an tar archive /path/to/archive.tar.gz
9Link to a binary file /path/to/binary
7Search engine query /query
8Telnet session kim holviala.com 79
# Hide a few files from the menu listing generated by *
-hiddenfile.txt
-hiddendir
# Change filetypes for this directory
:png=g
:foo=b
Include links to users own gopherspaces:
~
List all available virtual hosts:
%
Include sub-gophermap:
=LICENSE
Execute script and parse output as subgophermap:
=/usr/bin/uptime
Here we stop processing the gophermap and include the regular menu:
*
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