The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, January 09, 2018

So tonight I'm gonna Internet like it's 1993

A few days ago I recived this email (which was not directly addressed to me):

From
Rouan Lucas van Ryn <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Subject
The Gopherspace Cookbook
Date
Sat, 6 Jan 2018 08:47:45 +0000

Greetings good people,

I have recently created a new Gopher hole, known as The Gopherspace Cookbook. It is a compendium of recipes from around Gopherspace. You're receiving this message to let you know that one or more of your recipes has been listed in the cookbook.

The cookbook is available at:
gopher://tellus.strangled.net/1/cookbook

Keep on cooking!
Keep on Gophering!

Feel free to get in touch if you have any queries.

Best,
Rouan aka jandal

--
gopher://grex.org/1/%7ejandal
gopher://tellus.strangled.net/

It's not spam, as the post in question, does have a recipe (if you are having problems with the link, don't worry, that is expected, but in the meantime, you will probably have more luck with this link). The links in question deal with Gopher, a protocol invented at the same time as HTTP, but was soon eclipsed as you couldn't inline cat pictures in a gopher page unlike a webpage. It's mostly dead.

But not all dead.

I'm surprised [No he's not. —Editor] that I haven't mentioned this before [He was being lazy. —Editor], but I set up a server to mainly serve up my blog via gopher: early last March. And if pressed for a reason—it was because I could. I thought it might be fun to have a phlog in addition to a blog.

It's not like it was hard to write the code (alternate link). It just took a day or so for me to get it working, and most of the conversion from HTML to plain text is done by Lynx (which is why it looks the way it looks; alternate link). And I do get the occasional hits on the gopher server, which I find amusing.

And yes, people do still use Gopher.

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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