This is a problem that I've had for as long as I can remember. I get a great new
idea for something that I want to do and then I do it obsessively for a few
months before petering out, getting another sure-fire idea, work on that
obsessively for a while, peter out, and repeating the cycle until the heat death
of the universe.
When I started up my first website and then turned it into a blog, I kept having
'great' ideas for more blogs. I'd register another domain, start another
website, spin up another blog, and then divide my attention between the 'main'
blog and the 'secondary' blog. They both ended up suffering and the secondary
(and tertiary and... whatever comes after 'tertiary') blog languished and
eventually got shuttered. This happened more times than I want to count right
now.
I realized now that those 'great ideas' should have probably been features
instead of full-on websites, but that's hindsight for you.
One of the 'great ideas' I had was to make a gopher hole. This very one! I
decided to make it to 'get back to basics' in a sense. I would make a site
without all the trappings of a 'modern' web site. I would be restricted to plain
text and maybe some HTML files if I got really ambitious. There was something
about the simplicity that drew me to it. I would make a gopher hole my new
project. It would save me from obsessing about stats and trying to make
something popular, and instead concentrate on making thing for the sake of
making things. Something that I think the Internet is sorely lacking.
I also think that Gopher doesn't get nearly the love that it should get, and I
wanted to do my part to keep this facet of the early Internet alive. I don't
keep track of how many hits this thing gets, so I don't know if anyone is even
reading it, but that no longer matters to me. I maintain it because maintaing it
is fun.
However, the thing happens that always happens: I got a great new idea for a
website I wanted to build.
It didn't happen right away, though. It gradually snuck up on me and I didn't
even realize that it was happening. I wrote bits and pieces about this in other
phlog entries, but about a year and a half ago I decided that I was going to use
one of the domains that I buy but never use (a problem which I'm currently
working on) to use. The server that this gopher hole sits on is way overpowered
for what it does, so I set up a site to track my video game collection. Just for
me, and not really for anyone else's consumption.
The short of it is that I had so much fun adding new features and things to the
page that it eventually started to resemble an actual website. It's been a year
and a half or so since I started on it, and I'm still having fun adding new
features, writing things, and generally just farting around with it. So much fun
that I've let this gopher hole languish, and I'm sorry about that.
On my computer, I use a piece of software called Clementine to organize and play
my collection of (completely legal) music files. That software hasn't had a
release in around seven years as of this writing and activity on its Github page
is no longer big and exciting, just small and bugfixy. Does that mean that the
project is dead? Or that it's 'done'? Or somewhere in-between?
That kind of reminded me about this gopher hole. It's not something that I'm
going to update every day, every week, or every month. It's something that I'm
going to update when I feel like I have something worth adding to it. That's
what the .rss feed is for.
The things that I put up already are just as good (or just as bad) as they were
when I put them up. Just because they're older doesn't mean that they're somehow
'less' in any way.
But beyond that I want this gopher hole to be a surprise for anyone that
stumbles on it. Kind of like the Old Internet(tm) that I remember. Where you
find a site however it was that you found it and you explore it to see what's
there.
That doesn't mean that this gopher hole is dead. It doesn't mean that I'm going
to put it in stasis, either. It gets updated when it gets updated, but I can't
commit to a schedule. Life's too short for that and I have too many other things
I want to do.
