[gopher] Re: Serving up gopher content via a wiki

["Jay Nemrow" <jnemrow@xxxxxxx>]

I looked at GN, but I found it at cross-purposes to what I wanted to
do and actually a terrible complication to the gopher philosophy,
which I have always felt is dead-simple serving with the least amount
of maintenence possible.  I throw content onto my server's hard drive
and anyone can access it and it takes no time at all.

GN seems to be a bridge, trying to take what was gopher content and
bringing it into the WWW world.  I also looked at WN, which was the
follow-up to GN (and web-only), and the problem with both is their
administrative overhead.  There are several files to be maintained
(security feature as you must specify exactly what you want served)
and you have to mange both gopher and web views of things.  I really
liked the built-in search abilities and the simplified CGIish stuff,
but the process of actually adding new content required more steps
than I really wanted to deal with.  It looked cool for a bit of retro
server.

Pygopherd gets set up once (really easy on Debian) and then you just
upload content into folders, which is what I am after (along with the
ability to get to the content from any web browser).  Of course,
everyone uses Gopher for different reasons and there can be servers to
fit each need - Pygopherd is close enough to fit my needs well enough.

Another wonderfully simple server is mgod, which I was using for over
a year.  The only reason that I am not using it now is that it didn't
have a built-in http server like Pygopherd.

Jay

On 7/10/08, JumpJet Mailbox <jumpjetinfo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Have you considered GN?
>  
> gopher://home.jumpjet.info/11\Treasure\Multi-Protocol_Gopher_Servers\Unix-based\GN
>
>  It serves up either HTTP or Gopher data DYNAMICALLY (depending on the client 
> request)!  Check out this operating GN server:
>  http://kostecke.net:70/
>  gopher://kostecke.net:70/
>  --- On Wed, 7/9/08, Jay Nemrow <jnemrow@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>  From: Jay Nemrow <jnemrow@xxxxxxx>
>
> Subject: [gopher] Re: Serving up gopher content via a wiki
>  To: gopher@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 12:14 AM
>
>
>  When I was struggling with how to "merge" the web and gopherspace, I
>  found
>  myself trying to determine if I wanted to make web content accessible
>  through a gopher client or to make gopher content accessible through the
>  web.  It seems a lot of people went for what I finally also decided was the
>  logical course: webified gopher content, which is to say just building web
>  access essentially atop a gopher server.
>  In my wiki/gopher hybrid, I immediately saw that there were monumental
>  differences, the most glaring was that gopher lends itself to a heirarchy
>  (the simpliest method mirrors the files/documents in folders[menus] scheme)
>  and wiki wants to be essentially flat (all pages on an equal footing and
>  crosslinked).  I found myself constantly wanting to make the wiki more
>  heirarchial because that is the gopher way (drilling down through menus)
>  which I find more to my liking.  I finally decided that I was really wanting
>  to conveniently add lower menus, files, or documents to gopher menus,
>  shuffle things about like it was in an outliner, and finally desired to
>  abandon wiki except for the interesting markup that could render nicely in a
>  web browser from a human-readable text file that gopher could serve up raw.
>  Again, it ended up being a webified gopher server/CMS system, losing a lot
>  of the wikiness.  I never got around to actually coding the idea, but I
>  still ponder some sort of Outliner/CMS/Gopher hierarchial mashup.
>
>  How do you plan to meld the wiki and the gopher?  I could never figure out
>  how to do both without losing the essence of either one or the other.
>  Perhaps you see a way that I never could figure out...
>
>  Jay
>
>  On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 10:17 AM, <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>  > On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 11:11:02AM -0500, brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote
>  >
>  >
>  > In fact, there's really no reason to make a big deal about a proxy
>  > being a gopher proxy -- many won't care, so long as they can simply
>  > find the information they need.  And the "clickable link" meme
>  will
>  > certainly carry over into the gopher world without users having to
>  > change their habits, install add-ons to their browsers, etc.
>  >
>  >
>  >
>
>
>
>
>