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Johan Bové

Replied to a post on rak.ac :

Hi Ryan, First of all, congratulations with your blog and gopher site / hole.

I discovered your writings just today on "republic". It's pretty cool how you managed to create and syndicate your notes and posts from Gopher to the WWW, and I was therefor wondering if you had heard of the Indieweb before? I think that on the wiki at https://indieweb.org you'll find lot of like-minded people and some introductions to indieweb tools likes webmentions and how to syndicate your content to other platforms if you wanted to.

In regard to "email tracking"; for commercial publishers this is their bread-and-butter, without knowing the statistics on how many readers and visitors their sites have, they can't convince new business to invest with them. So I'm afraid email tracking will be here for a long time still. Some publishers do offer a txt-only variant of their newsletters, and when they do, I opt in for that. And I avoid any tracking query parameters for any linked content.

Johan Bové

My Gopher publishing process feels good as I’m doing it offline first. Whatever happens to my site, I will always have the most recent version locally on my machine, with all changes logged in Git repository. When I push the master branch to the remote repo, the gopher site is updated. No parsing required.

Johan Bové

Enjoying the constraints of the Gopher protocol as a minimalist zen-mode kind of online publishing revival.

Johan Bové

Proud of myself for achieving a 10 day streak of writing a daily gopher journal log entry.

Johan Bové

Taz.de - Die Tageszeitung - has a space: gopher://taz.de:70

Johan Bové

My site is about 38K big - still plenty of space left on the 1.24MB floppy disk

Johan Bové

Gophering along

2 min read

A screenshot of Johan's Gopherhole

I've been spending way too much time on servers in the last couple of days.

The Gopher Web is intriguing and fascinating and I totally understand the attraction of an ad-free, cookie-free, not-for-profit, underground(-ish) alternative to today's crowded and over-commericially exploited (according to many) HTTP Web.

It's not super straightforward to access, even-though there are good dedicated free browsers (for all platforms) available that totally support the Gopher protocol.

But I have the feeling that because the Gopher Web is a little harder to access, it is actually part of the attractiveness. Lots of humans tired of the current state of the WWW, who still want to publish
content and share stuff, are finding an alternative, albeit archaic, in the Gopher web.

Setting up a Gopher server wasn't hard either thanks to open-source software from dedicated hobbyist developers.

Formatting plain-text files has been interesting too. It's amazing how much effort some Gopher Hole Phloggers take to create beautiful ASCII art and line-out their paragraphs!

Discovering Phlogs has been an eye-opener and inspiring. There are many Phloggers who are publishing worthwile stories and interesting articles in plain text files in their Gopher holes or gopher burrows.

And I had some fun first-time experiences too playing a funny text-based adventure game called "Lost Pig" (2007) -  it's an interactive story, with lots of funny dialogue and plenty of character which by itself is also proof that Gopher pages can also be entertaining.

The Floodgap Gopher (Gopher proxy) site is a great place to start.

Johan Bové

Johan Bové

Johan Bové

Johan Bové

Oh hello Gopher!

Johan Bové

Johan Bové

Johan Bové

Johan Bové