A fresh coat of paint
Sat, 16 Aug 2025
Technology, Meta content
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If you read the web-based version of this blog, you might have
noticed that it has recently received a minor makeover. Instead
of the previous formatting in plain-text, there is now ACTUAL
formatting happening, paragraphs can be re-flowed to fit on
smaller screens, lines are actually lines and not just a bunch
of hyphens, there are actual headings which are picked up by
screenreaders, etcetera.
If you read this blog on gopher, you should have noticed...
absolutely nothing. This post is about that.
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For those unfamiliar: Gopher is a protocol much like the Hyper
Text Transfer Protocol (http) which is used to serve this
web-page to you. However, instead of transferring hypertext
(HTML) which allows for formatting, re-flowing, and all the
other nice things mentioned in the introduction, the gopher
protocol transfers mostly plain text files.
When I started this blog up again, my main intention was to
start writing as soon as possible. As I mentioned in the first
post on this blog (The return of the blog), the program I wrote
to generate the front page was incredibly simple. I did not want
to spend time to make something complicated, I just wanted
something that worked. At the same time, I wanted to support
both gopher, web, and rss as targets. To achieve this (still:
without putting in much time so that I could start writing as
soon as possible). I just formatted plain text which gopher
could sever directly and then added VERY minimal html tags to
the web version which basically told the browser: don't do
anything with this text, just show it as it is.
This approach was great, and it served its purpose in allowing
me to write. At the same time though, it was quite a bad reading
experience on smaller devices, and it did not allow for as much
creativity in styling as I liked.
As such, since I had some time this summer, I wrote a new
indexer which (amongst other improvements) added html tags to
the plain text files that I was (and still am) writing in. These
tell the browser where the paragraphs are, what is a heading and
what is normal text. It recognizes, quotations, code-snippets,
horizontal lines. It coverts the backticks and single-quotes I
write
``like this''
To properly curved left-double-quotes and right-double-quotes.
``Like this''[1]
This post is to call out to other writers who target these
platforms that writing content which is nice to read for both
gopher AND the web is indeed possible. And it is possible even
if you don't use and off-the-shelf solution such as markdown.
The important thing is that -- whatever formatting you use --
you have to be consistent with it.
I for example underlined headers in the text version with
hyphens for main headings and equals-signs for sub headings.
This made it incredibly trivial for a program to detect these
lines and add the relevant html tags to them.
Likewise, I always indent code blocks with tabs, and quotation
blocks with The greater-then symbol.
> This allows for easy detection, processing, and subsequent
> styling
Insert code snippet here
All the while without affecting the formatting seen by gopher
readers.
This consistency in formatting allowed me to code up a
completely custom parser in just an afternoon.
That being said, I did have to make some minor adjustments to
some old posts. A rather funny bug was that if I had a paragraph
immediately following a horizontal line, the whole block would
be counted as a line, and the paragraph would not show up on the
web version. I decided to leave this in as a feature and just
move all paragraphs away from the horizontal lines instead.
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I can use this to write gopher-only paragraphs after all ;)
There were some other inconsistencies In my writing particularly
when it came to lists. I decided (since it was much much easier
to program this way) that all lists should henceforth be
indented. This was a minor change since I don't use lists overly
much.
And that is all. I hope this might be useful to some other
writers in the gopher space. If you want to check out the new
indexer/parser, you can find it on my Codeberg page[2].
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[1]: If you are on gopher, obviously you won't see this any
differently.
[2]: I did just notice a minor deficiency which I have not yet
solved. Gopher can only display lines under 80 characters,
and web-urls tend to be longer than this limit. Therefore,
including a link to my codeberg page gets a little awkward.
As such, please excuse the space in the following url
between `200115/' and `pages/':
https://codeberg.org/User18130814200115/
pages/src/branch/master/indexer.go
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All of my writing and software projects are available free of
charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept
monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask
you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund,
organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral
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