[gopher] Re: Feelings I got gophering around

[chris <chris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Well....
Alessandro, Everything you said is true to a certain point.
If I might speak in general as to what gopher is, it is true
there are many servers out there "locked in time" historic
giants no longer updated however still valuable in their own
right (The Well for example). Also there are many new servers
that dont do anything after they get up and running. But then
again , what does that have to do with you or I ? Take a different
angle on it with your initial question...
"how could I put this Gopher-stuff to use"?
and perhaps ask "How can I add usefull information to gopher-space."
Gopher is a wonderful way to exchange information in what I call
the "least common denominator" take wml for example, imo it stinks
I use a squid html-wml proxy and browse to my gophers hourly updated
.txt files...works great! (my cell browser doesnt understand html or
.txt but pygophered makes a nice html of .txt and squid converts it
just fine to wml.)
I don't want to sound like I am promoting my site but to show ideas
that I had about how to serve usefull info I will use my site as an
example. gopher://hal3000.cx
I use lynx -dump and fetch to grab hourly updated weather for Antarctica,
Arctic, Wisconsin and Israel in text as well as images from each location.
In addition within directory Wisconsin under the .name Updated Hourly!
I have used sed to drop in a file which I snatched from wmweather (a
desktop weather button) The file contains the METAR (aviation weather)
for station KOSH (Oshkosh Wisconsin), it is...
sed "1, /=/ s@Updated Hourly!@` sed '$! s:$:\\\:' /usr/home/wifes/metar` @"
/usr/home/me/gopher-data/Weather/Wisconsin/.names >
/usr/home/me/gopher-data/Weather/Wisconsin/.names2
I thought it was slick and had many possibilities. (see 
/Phlog/11-15-2004.txt)
Under Audio_Visual there are Images, Music and Videos...its sparse there 
but
an ongoing build of a 1967 Harley Davidson Sportster chopper is started 
there.
And a story/review about the Honda Ruckus...
/Financial has the USD conversion updated daily in text.
/Misc has some great Stephan Hawking articles in .txt and .pdf
as well as role play history and a formula to determine tire size on 4x4
trucks...
/Recipes even has a recipe for making your own soap...more to come!
You still have a 286 or 8088? Look in Software for Eric Praetzles
dvpeg dos image viewer it rocks!
How about helping me to get gspider working in a more friendly manner..
Tim Fraser made it and was nice enough to share, by the way you can
see gspider results from a couple weeks ago under 
/Links/Gopher/All_Active_Servers/
A note along that line, I am running jughead pointed at several sites (ok 
18 sites)
currently the Multi Gopher Search is running on its "small" database while 
the big
one builds the small is 200,000 selectors, the big one is 1.4 million. I 
am having
some issues with the database build, I am pretty sure its how I decided to 
cat all
the data files together instead of sorting them but...I have left a 
message with
Rhett "jonzy" Jones , jugheads author asking if he would like to chat abit 
about
his wonderful search engine...I hope he will!
Telnet?? go ahead theres sdf and twenex and the always amusing 
blinkenlights ascii
star wars movie :) (Links/Telnet)
In the future I am looking at adding a smaug based mud and an amnuts based 
talker
as well as an amnuts_dev smaller mud.
Don't forget some of the guys have gophermail, and quux has an awesome 
pygfarm
dictionary grouping. R.A.Pavlov over at gopher.rp.sbp.su is looking at a 
wais server
(his site is down atm) and the fellas over at hyperzoom are busy working 
on hardware
and setting up their site.
Oh news you want? How about /News look for bbc leads in .txt or better yet 
check out
newsfeeds in .html or .txt updated hourly and grabbed from the output of 
rawdog the
rss agregater without delusions of granduer by Adam Sampson...
Wow! and thats just the random stuff I thought of doing with gopher...
Come on Alessandro...
Think not of what gopher can do for you,
Think of what you can do for Gopher!   :)
Seriously it can be whatever we want it to be it's such a clean open space
quiet yes, thats a good thing! And here to have as ours, no jingles ringing
in your ears no flash burning your eyes no M$ yanking at your wallet.
Make of it what you will, and oh yes...
If you build it they will come, but then again do we want "them"?
I am always open for sugestions and I can always use help programing.
I am a Hello World! kind of programer (perhaps you have seen my work ;) )
Have a good day and maybe we should use this forum more often for all
our gopher ideas.
Chris
Gopher://hal3000.cx


On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:58:40 +0100, Alessandro Selli 
<dhatarattha@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>    So, here we are, with a couple more new Gopher
> servers running, serving something or close to
> nothing to who-knows-who, and a host of old
> Gopher servers "gone to the great Gopherhole in

> worth the effort.  Is the Gopher community today something like
> the people who occasionally meet on a Latin Conference or a
> Sanskrit poetry contest?
>



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