On 12/31/19 8:21 PM, Bradley Gannon wrote:

I'm not familiar with gopher, but some light reading has revealed that it's a way of organizing information on the Internet that sort of got its lunch eaten by the Web. Many of you have more grey in your beards than me (visible or not) and know first-hand what gopher is like. In any case, ~club, your task this week is to do something with your gopher space here on tilde.club. A "hello world" will suffice, but I encourage you to do what you can to make it interesting. When you do, be sure to post it here so we can all check it out!

For the uninitiated, gopher is a pre-http protocol that was created at the University of Minnesota:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

~tomasino has a lovely intro site set up at https://gopher.zone that's worth a look.

Our gopher homepage shows users that have created a ~/public_gopher directory and changed their main gophermap. To view it, open your favorite gopher client (try "lynx gopher://tilde.club" if you're just starting) or open it in a web proxy: https://gopher.tildeverse.org/tilde.club

Since I don't personally know much about gopher, I haven't even checked to see if anyone is using it on this server. I haven't seen anyone mention it, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. If you've already got something going over there, great! I'll see you there. If not, then I encourage you to take this small step with me.

There's also some additional info on our wiki here: http://tilde.club/wiki/gopher.html

Gopher aficionados tend to gather in the #gopher channel on irc as well, which is a good place to ask questions.

Happy gophering! ~benharri

I've added a brief summary of the Weekly Webpage Workshops on my gopher page: gopher://tilde.club/1/%7empnordland

Nice work! I too remember using gopher, but didn't ever make anything with it.

Alan

PS - I'm jealous that you live in Squamish! I spent my best summer there, teaching camp kids to climb.

On 5 Jan 2020, at 0:00, Alexis Birkill wrote:

This is my first time participating in the weekly workshops (thanks to Bradley for the excellent idea), and my first time posting to the mailing list -- hi! I'm really pleased to be a part of this community, and although I don't often get much done, I always enjoy reading the mailing list posts and browsing everyone's pages.

This is also my first time creating any Gopher pages -- I remember using Gopher back when I first had access to the Internet in the early 90s, but although I started playing around creating websites pretty much straight away, I never created a Gopher site.

As my most memorable experience with text interfaces was playing adventure games, I decided I'd create a (poor) homage in the form of a very simple maze game that takes the form of a rather excessive number of gophermap files and subdirectories! You can try it out directly via gopher here:

gopher://tilde.club/1/~abirkill/gophermaze

or via the excellent web proxy here:

https://gopher.tildeverse.org/tilde.club/1/~abirkill/gophermaze/

Enjoy, and don't get lost!

~abirkill

i've since expanded my page with my "research" on gopher :) gopher has a really simple and plain syntax (if a bit archaic) and then gophernicus has added some more bits to it.

~bdeshi

On Fri, 2020-01-03 at 01:38 +0600, bdeshi wrote:

this is going to be a great way to learn more about gopher. i'm trying to make some stuff up: gopher://tilde.club/1/~bdeshi/www5 eager to see what kind of hole others dig. (is that a valid analogy?) and happy 2020 everyone!

~bdeshi

On Tue, 2019-12-31 at 20:21 -0500, Bradley Gannon wrote:

...

Dear ~club:

I saw that many of you made (or are even currently making) it snow on your pages. Well done. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to make it happen, being that I approach CSS in much the same way a ferret approaches a game of shuffleboard---that is, incoherently and more or less according to chance---but at the last moment I managed to find a post online that was simple enough for me to understand. The results are about as bad as expected (complete illegibility), but alas, it's only exactly what I asked for. I doubt it will last through the week on my page.

Well, ~club, here we are. The year of middle-distance predictions is upon us. How many of us will turn out to have been wrong about what we thought we'd be doing with ourselves in 2020? I remember reading an article in a magazine about 15 years ago that claimed we'd all be rid of cables by now because long-distance wireless charging would be ubiquitous. This and similar drivel will fall to the slowly-advancing bulldozer blade of time this year. A shame, really, since the only thing 2020 did wrong was be a round number for futurists to pluck out of the timeline.

But! It's not all bad. New years mean new opportunities for learning, growing, and all that stuff you learned on PBS. This week, I propose that we look forward into the new year by pulling something out from the past and taking it with us.

I'm not familiar with gopher, but some light reading has revealed that it's a way of organizing information on the Internet that sort of got its lunch eaten by the Web. Many of you have more grey in your beards than me (visible or not) and know first-hand what gopher is like. In any case, ~club, your task this week is to do something with your gopher space here on tilde.club. A "hello world" will suffice, but I encourage you to do what you can to make it interesting. When you do, be sure to post it here so we can all check it out!

Since I don't personally know much about gopher, I haven't even checked to see if anyone is using it on this server. I haven't seen anyone mention it, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. If you've already got something going over there, great! I'll see you there. If not, then I encourage you to take this small step with me.

To the gopherhole!

Bradley