[gopher] web->gopher

["em@nuel" <em@xxxxxxx>]

Some of you may remember the web->gopher gateway I was working on some
months back.  Well, I just woke it up.  It had been dormant in the
middle of a bunch of work to improve the code and add proper Gopher+ for
some time now, and I just tied up a bunch of loose ends today.

So, except for Ask blocks, web->gopher now supports all of Gopher+, that
I know of.  You can view extended information such as attributes,
specify which view of a file you want to see, etc.  The interface isn't
as nice as I'd like, but it's there.  Gopher+ is soooo nice.

It's also useful for downloading large files and directories now.
Before web->gopher would read all the data from the gopher server into
the web server's memory, then dump the results to the browser.  Now it
streams nicely.  I'm presently streaming a 192kbps MP3 from my gopher
server through web->gopher to WinAmp, and it's all perfectly happy.  I
have yet to load test it, though.

Some stuff is gone, such as the tree interface.  It will probably make a
comeback in the future, though possibly in a different way.

I did a bunch of testing, and everything that broke I either fixed or
concluded was a bug in the server (or a bug in my understanding of the
Gopher+ protocol).  Yes, I need to make it a bit more forgiving with its
protocol handling, and it's not very friendly in parts (for example,
downloading an empty directory gives you... an empty screen!), but it
seems to work well.  Well enough that I'll soon disappear my web site
(which is mostly gone anyway) to be replaced with web->gopher.

Anyway, please give it a try:

http://heatdeath.org/

or point your gopher at gopher.heatdeath.org, then pick web->gopher