By way of an introduction to this phlog, I recently
discovered that people are still using gopher. So I started
exploring gopherholes and phlogs. So far, I really enjoy the
following characteristics of gopherspace:
* the general absence of hyperlinks in documents. The
reading experience is so much more calm, since once you
start a document, no further interaction is typically
required.
* gopher works with lynx! I have been a lynx (and pine)
user since 1997. Over the years, the headers and links that
populate the beginning of web pages have grown, making the
entire experience of reading pages on a text browser quite
onerous. There's a lot of scrolling and of course,
significant portions of sites don't render at all owing to
the widespread use of javascript. But gopher pages still
render beautifully on lynx.
* the community feeling. Gopher brings me back to my first
experiences with networking/internet (dial up into Bulletin
Board Systems, the local Freenet, and then my university's
UNIX server). I loved the creativity and personal nature of
what people were doing on those BBS's and the web. The web
today is commercialized and populated by a different type of
person. Gopherspace looks to me to be a lot like the
internet of the 1990s. That's a compliment to all of you.
Next time, I'll write about my interests, which will likely
guide the direction of my little piece of gopherspace.
