No ROOPHLOCH, and my October Gothic Just a general status update. I didn’t manage to do ROOPHLOCH this year. Partly, I was busy, but a bigger part is maybe just that I didn’t have anything new to do. Post from my phone, post from a modern but obsolete computer tethered to my phone, post in a park, post in a nature reserve. It just feels like I’ve done the easy levels, but the next level up is unreachable for me.
Weather and things I am, as usual for me and ROOPHLOCH, sneaking things in at the end of the month. One reason has been that it has been too damn hot here! It doesn’t normally start cooling down for autumn here until October, but this year it has been especially bad. Temperatures in the mid 80s F, with heat indices in the 90s. We’ve finally started to have cool evenings and mornings as of last week, and now after the equinox, I had been hoping the days would start being tolerable.
This list is necessarily incomplete, partly due to the complexity of
modern HTTP and HTML, but it hits the high points. If you think
there is something critical missing, please contact me by email.
Today’s the last day to submit entries to ROOPHLOCH, the outdoor, off-grid Gopher logging event. I’ve submitted one the last two years, but I’m going to skip it this year. My main reason is that I want to move my Gopher hole to mirror my Gemini capsule rather than my website, but I haven’t got around to making that conversion. If I were going to post ROOPHLOCH this year, I’d rather it be on Gopher and Gemini rather than Gopher and the WWW.
As is the tradition, I am writing this blog outdoors, for Solderpunk’s ROOPHLOCH 2020 challenge. I’m in a picnic shelter at Dreher Island State Park, where my family has been camping for the last two days. As an offline exercise, this is not especially successful, because there is WiFi in the campground. In fact, that’s why we’re camping.
With COVID-19 distancing measures in effect, I’m able to work remotely, and the kids are able to do school.
I’m writing this blog outdoors, in accordance with the rules of Solderpunk’s ROOPHLOCH challenge. I’m also offline… there’s no Wifi here, and I have tethering turned off for my phone; I’ll turn it on for a minute when I’m done writing in order to publish it.
I’m sitting in a park or greenway that may or may not be closed to the public. This sign blocking the stairs to the boardwalk suggests that it is, but the corresponding wheelchair ramp isn’t blocked.
Minor germinal update: link syntax So, the Gemini link syntax was finalized:
Link Syntax Finalized
The one place this affects Germinal is in the generation of directory indexes. Germinal’s directory indexing code has been updated accordingly.
I have also updated the links on my Gemini site.
Unless there are changes coming to the response header line format, this is probably the last Gemini change that actually affects Germinal. Pretty much everything else is client-side.
Is the gemini map format intended to be reflowed? One question that hasn’t been addressed in the Gemini speculative specification is whether the Gemini map file format text/gemini is intended to be reflowed. By reflowed, I mean mainly that the line-length of the file itself is not intended to be mapped exactly to the output device, which should instead lay out the text with appropriate line lengths. This is what HTML renderers do, and what MarkDown renderers do, usually by way of conversion to HTML.
Germinal is a server for the Gemini Protocol that I’ve been writing in Common Lisp during my lunches and some evenings.
It is named after the early 20th century Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper Germinal. I wanted to name it after an anarchist publication to convey the idea of people sharing information and ideas with each other, in contrast to the way the web is used to push advertising from corporations to people.
Good netizen solderpunk has been writing about the design of a protocol that is slightly more complex than gopher, but significantly simpler than http; while at the same time being significantly more powerful than gopher. I have thoughts about this, as I’ve posted about before, and I’m interested in contributing to this project and the conversation around it. These are the main documents where they discuss it. If you only have time for one, read just the FAQ, but they are all worthwhile and short, easy reads.
If you don’t have a gopher client handy, you can browse the gopherverse using the Floodgap Gopher-HTTP Gateway. It will proxy gopher pages to you over https, so you can read them in a browser that doesn’t support gopher. The OverbiteWX extension for Firefox uses it to handle gopher URLs.
This is a very useful service, but the design is not very appealing to me. Gopher is supposed to be simple plain text, it’s true.
As part of the ongoing revitalization of gopher, there has been quite a bit of discussion about what, exactly, is good about gopher, and whether you can separate that from what’s bad about the world wide web. From another angle: are there good things about the web that we can import to alleviate gopher’s shortcomings?
The discourse A recent thread of that conversation has been an exchange between ~solderpunk and ~enkiv2.
Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web A simple gopher client for Gnome, written in Vala This is in early stages, but it works fine for most gopher sites. I would like to find time to help out with it.
Shizaru, an opinionated web server This is a web server written in golang that attempts to “serve no evil” by imposing strong opinions on pages that it serves. The default opinions focus strongly on a “fast, safe, simple, clean, respectful” web.
This blog is produced with hugo, a static site generator, and the articles are written in Markdown, a plain text markup format. Since the articles are fundamentally plain text, for some time I’ve been wanting to make them available over gopher, a simple protocol that was created around the same time as the first versions of the World Wide Web. I used gopher before I used the WWW in Lynx and Mosaic, and even after the web was dominant, I used GNOFN’s free dial-up gopher as my access point to the internet.
