ECHO Gopher Submissions Guidelines "What is a Gopher? And what, then, is the ECHO Gopher? Why is this Gopher different from all other Gophers?" A Gopher is a fairly simple way to deliver files, which are usually text files, to Internet users via a very simple menu interface. You can read the files, save them on your own machine, or, in some cases, play the sounds the files represent or view them as images. The files originate at Gopher server sites and are organized by an administrator, or group of administrators, much as a newspaper is edited together from various sources. Like a newspaper, some of these sources may not be at the local site - it's like a news feed. In fact, some Gophers are more like bibliographies and have hardly any local files! Gopher servers are usually read with Gopher Client software, which can have various levels of sophistication. One can also read Gopher servers with WWW Clients, such as Netscape or Lynx. All information on a Gopher can be referenced with a fairly straightforward WWW URL. The ECHO Gopher, since it originates from the ECHO BBS in New York City, has a lot of local material which is based both on New York cultural activities and the writings of members of the ECHO community. This information includes lists of galleries, schedules of performances, electronic forms of zines, and catalogs of magazines and recordings. The ECHO Gopher also pillages ECHO for the tasteful, trenchant obser- vances of its suave, pompous and literate populace. "What formats do I have to choose from for information I want to serve?" Since the Gopher exists in the digital world which is replete with incompatible standards, the information on it must be formatted for general consumption. This means real carriage returns - also known as line breaks - with a right margin of about 70 characters. Also, no "funny characters" which use more than 7 bits, like those convenient Mac '...' and long dashes, funky quote marks, ,(c), and such as that. Even the lowly tab is subject to misinterpretation, so please convert them to spaces! I can fix this stuff, but if YOU do it then I won't screw something else up by mistake while editing it. The Gopher can also serve binary files, and some gopher clients can show imagery and play sounds directly (or at least automatically). There are many, many formats for imagery and sounds, so generally, we'd like to keep it down to as few as possible! Images: GIF or JPEG JPEG with tasteful compression is especially good for scanned images with lots of colors. GIF ("jiff") is a popular format originating from CI$, good for lossless delivery of 8-bit computer images. Most decent graphic programs can save in these two formats. If not, it's easy to find programs like DeBabelizer or the PBM package. Sounds: MPEG or mu-law MPEG isn't that widely available, but it compresses sound quite a bit and can decompress to 16 bit stereo, while mu-law is cheaper and easier to use, but delivers telephone quality audio. Mu-law may be also spelled ulaw (u== greek mu). Get your paws on the public domain audio converter SOX in one of its formats and you can convert things to mu-law, at least. Of course, the smaller the better, so if you crop and shrink the imagery before you start, it will be even smaller when it's ready to be served. Ditto with sounds - use your digital editing chops to cut that sound bite to the bone! "How do I get my information on the ECHO Gpoher?" To upload (for the brave)... There is an upload command (I think) buried in Caucus somewhere which attempts to use zmodem, kermit or some other such protocol, The Easy Way: stick the files on a floppy and mail 'em to me: Henry Lowengard 43 W 16 st #2D NYC 10011 or hand them over to me personally at the next biweekly ECHO Art Bar meeting. I can read and translate: Mac high density disks (not low density at all!) IBM minidisks, NeXT or Amiga. Also, if you can avoid spaces, apostrophes, ampersands and other potholes in the ASCII world in your file names, I will be a happier person. They can be reasonably long, but the fewer the characters, the better chance for a typo-free tomorrow. It's a good idea to give a suggested 1-line menu item description for each file - which I can turn into a gopher menu, or series of menus. Almost As Good: Email them to me: you've probably emailed this stuff somewhere else anyway. I can also decode uuencoded files, so you can send binary data this way as well. email to: jhhl@echonyc.com or jhhl@panix.com you can even use Caucus mail. Do It Your Self - Apprentice Method: or, if you feel like testing your unix chops - and are only sending printable stuff - try this: AND NOW? !bash <<< go to the "bash" shell [don't ask - ed.] > cat >file1 <<< "take everything you type and put it in this file" ...send the file now via SEND ASCII menu or whatever. ....all done... ^C <<< type control-c > chmod 644 file1 <<< change permission so others may read it repeat the cat... chmod stuff until all the files are there. you can check on the lengths etc. with the handy > ls -l <<< "long" directory command. to get back to caucus, type: > exit and that's it! (then tell me where they are!) Do It Your Self : Gopher Godess Method: If you are comfortable with unix, "we" can put you in the gopher group and then you can make your own directories, menus, scripts, etc. ECHO uses gn to serve the gopher files, and there is a gn WWW site: "http://www.cwru.edu/1/about.gopher" and "gopher://www.cwru.edu/11/about.gopher" gn is a single server that can talk to http and gopher clients. This means that the ECHO gopher can also serve up WWW pages - although we aren't doing that now. Basically, read the man pages on gn and mkcache and the docs for gn. Taking Things From ECHO Items: There's a wealth of materials sitting around getting their bits dusty in old ECHO conferences. Perhaps you are a host or a constant contributor to some item that you'd like adapted for gopher use. One thing you can do to help is use the little-known SH IT xx >filename feature to move an entire item into a file for you! (or, you can issue PAGEROFF and capture the thing with SH IT xx ). Then you can download it to your own computer, edit it up somewhat and send it to me. I have some scripts which can turn the raw caucus output into something more agreeable to the gopher world - it uses features of gn to pretend each response is a searchable file. Look at the "Yellow Train" story in the Echoid Writing section of the gopher for an idea of how this can work - certain "reaction" responses are combined with the original to make a single gopher menu item. If you are really responsible, you will try to inform the people who originally posted that you are "publishing" their responses. This is a difficult task, which is likely to fill up your mailbox. I'm trying to figure out a semi automatic way to A: inform all the posters in an item that their response may be going out to the real world B: allow for easy confirmation/disapproval at any time. C: allow you to query that data. D: confirm the removal of a post. Some of these ideas are brought up in the Gopher item, Zines #10. You can post about the interaction and design of e-zines in ther, if you please. There is also a newer ECHO Gopher Item, Internet #69, which is supposed to be a catch all for quesitions and gripes as well as suggestions. For more technical details on gopher maintenance, read the forthcoming guidelines2 file! - Henry Lowengard, aka Nemo Gopher gofer jhhl@echonyc.com - Nov 17 '94 (rev 4) .