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.
~ [SDF Gopher FAQ]:
https://sdf.org/?faq?GOPHER
~ [SDF Gopher Tutorial]:
http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher
~ [Gopher Club Phlogs]:
gopher://gopher.club:70/1/phlogs/
~ [Slugmax SDF Gopher Tutorial]:
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/docs/gopher/sdf_gopher_tutorial.txt
~ [Ruari]:
gemini://ruario.flounder.online/journal.gmi
~ [Sample gophermap for Gophernicus]:
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/docs/README.Gophermap
~ [Szczezuja's Gopher hole]:
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/szczezuja/
~ [Formatting Gemtext for Gopher]:
gemini://ruario.flounder.online/gemlog/2022-01-04_Formatting_Gemtext_for_Gopher.gmi
--
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@ Sat 15 Jan 2022 04:16:04 PM CET - Version 1.0
@ Sat 23 Apr 2022 11:55:02 AM CEST - Version 1.1
