Digging Holes
2020-12-16


Did I mention all my content is also available on gopher? Well, it is. You can
find links on the web, and all the gopherholes link to each other as well.

The first time I had actual contact with gopher was in the late 90so. 13 year old
me was loitering in an Internet café (HEAVEN, I should write about it some
time), and these two foreigners came in. After they sat down I was pretty
surprised. Not at their presence but at what was going on in their screens. Back
in those days, the web and the Internet in general were flashy new things around these parts and
most people still had not had much contact with them. These two, however, were
looking at what to my eyes instantly became the coolest thing ever: plain text
files and what I mistook for some strange DOS prompt type thing... Only much
much later would I realize they were gopherholes.

I couldn't muster enough English to ask them what was going on, and I also
didn't want to make it (even more) obvious that I had been watching the whole
thing, so once they left, their secrets left with them. I'm pretty sure I've must
have seen the words "gopher" and "gopherhole" used in the context of "things you
can do in the Internet" at some point or another after that but they were few and far in between.

Fast forward to now, and with my involvement in the tildeverse and the small web
and all that, I've reconnected with gopher and decided to give it a shot. But
what to put in my gopherhole?

Well, seeing as I'm already running a bunch of blogs where I write about
assorted stuff, why not go with that? This presented the problem of how to get
my content out of hugo and into plaintext files.

Fortunately, a couple searches later I came across JFM's blog[^1] which set me
on the right track. The solution presented there required some tweaking on my
part in order for it to work together with my Drone setup. Full documentation of
that will be on the dotfiles blog.

Also of note is the longer and more involved solution John Godlee[^2] came up
with, with the small caveat that it's for use with Jekyll but I'm confident it
could be adapted.

TL;DR you can now read my rambles at gopher://tilde.team/~dgy too if that's your
thing.

[^1]: https://jfm.carcosa.net/blog/computing/hugo-gopher/
[^2]: https://johngodlee.github.io/2019/11/20/gopher.html

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