I received a nice email today from a member of the SDF phlogging
community. In it he noted that he enjoyed reading my phlog, but was having
layout and spacing issues while using the SDF gopher client. I'll share some
of my response, then I'd love to hear your thoughts about what I should
do. Reply by comment here, or shoot me an email, or grab me on SDF jabber.
"On the http side of things I always loved bloxsom as a blog engine, it
was simple and yet had a lot of features common to more bloated
clients. Until very recently, my motd site was a pybloxsom install. When
wt@sdf created germ, I jumped on it and improved it and slerm was born,
I saw it as very similar to bloxsom. That said, I admit it takes a bit
more navigation to get to a single post. I always saw this as a
trade-off - the front page of the phlog was cleaner if it just had post
summaries and a link to continue reading for the longer ones. The post
tags allow one to read related phlog entries in one screenful. ... The
inline links were an idea I had to make navigation to outside sites
easier. Rather than a copy/paste of the URL, you can just hit enter on
the link and (in lynx and gopher) use left-arrow to go back to where you
were.
However, perhaps I am imposing too much of a www-worldview on gopher. I
have been thinking lately of reverting to a static phlog, and writing a
simple guestbook CGI for people who want to leave the odd comment.
Related entries could always be put into a directory after the fact."
So what do you think? Do you prefer a (relatively) heavier solution like
slerm, or static text files, perhaps with a simple guestbook? Is a dynamic,
CGI-based phlog too much for gopher? One of the things I really like about
slerm is the automatic grouping of related posts by tag links. I mention
above that it can be done later by putting the original post text files into
a separate directory, but that assumes one tag per post - most of my posts
have multiple tags, so the work involved is not worth the return, at least
in my mind.
