Digging Holes
Did I mention all my content is also available on gopher? Well, it is. You can find links on the web, and all the gopherholes link to each other as well.
The first time I had actual contact with gopher was in the late 90so. 13 year old me was loitering in an Internet cafĂ© (HEAVEN, I should write about it some time), and these two foreigners came in. After they sat down I was pretty surprised. Not at their presence but at what was going on in their screens. Back in those days, the web and the Internet in general were flashy new things around these parts and most people still had not had much contact with them. These two, however, were looking at what to my eyes instantly became the coolest thing ever: plain text files and what I mistook for some strange DOS prompt type thing… Only much much later would I realize they were gopherholes.
I couldn’t muster enough English to ask them what was going on, and I also didn’t want to make it (even more) obvious that I had been watching the whole thing, so once they left, their secrets left with them. I’m pretty sure I’ve must have seen the words “gopher” and “gopherhole” used in the context of “things you can do in the Internet” at some point or another after that but they were few and far in between.
Fast forward to now, and with my involvement in the tildeverse and the small web and all that, I’ve reconnected with gopher and decided to give it a shot. But what to put in my gopherhole?
Well, seeing as I’m already running a bunch of blogs where I write about assorted stuff, why not go with that? This presented the problem of how to get my content out of hugo and into plaintext files.
Fortunately, a couple searches later I came across JFM’s blog1 which set me on the right track. The solution presented there required some tweaking on my part in order for it to work together with my Drone setup. Full documentation of that will be on the dotfiles blog.
Also of note is the longer and more involved solution John Godlee2 came up with, with the small caveat that it’s for use with Jekyll but I’m confident it could be adapted.
TL;DR you can now read my rambles at gopher://tilde.team/~dgy too if that’s your thing.