As everyone reading this probably already knows, there has
been a lot of talk going around about the best way to list
phlogs, keep track of gopher holes, and the like. In all of
this discussion many options have been presented, but one
existing system has been all but ignored: papa's "The Daily
Batch."[1]

As I understand it, "The Daily Batch" is designed to be a
place where you can go to see what has been updated on all
grex.org gopher holes in the past 24hrs. It scans the
entire structure of all grex user gopher holes, and creates
a list of items that are new or updated.

Clearly, The Daily Batch is designed to run on the server,
and is primarily intended for multi-user servers. It isn't
something, I think, that would be adapted for an individual
to run in an attempt to track gopher space on their own.

A few of the solutions going around for SDF seem to be
focused on providing a "live" update of what is new. This
is of course conjecture on my part, not having seen the
source of these programs, but it is based on the
performance (or lack thereof) of the scripts. I don't
know if SDF's official listings are real-time or not.

I see great benefits in the "daily" update method over the
"live" update method. Speed is the most obvious, but
another benefit to Papa's daily method is the ability to
track what went on over the past several days. Papa's
program has a "Back numbers" feature, which lets you see
what was updated yesterday, or earlier, in case you
missed it. This means you can catch up quickly, without
having to scour through gopher holes individually.

As for scalability, I think Papa's program would need to
be modified a bit to be truly functional on a site as
large as SDF. Instead of a page showing every update, it
might want to start with a page of users that have updated
content, and let the reader drill-down from there. I guess
it would be evident if The Daily Batch ever made it's way
over to SDF.

I think "The Daily Batch" might actually be the best way to
give people updates on a multi-user gopher server. It's
fast, it let's you see exactly what was updated, and it has
a history of the changes in case you miss a day.

Having said all of that, I'm not sure I've added anything
to the actual conversation. But if nothing else, try out
The Daily Batch to see what I mean.

[1] gopher://grex.org:70/1/~papa/The_Daily_Batch