Subj : Re: Gopher
To   : Lord Gareth
From : Gluon
Date : Tue Jun 02 2020 20:30:26

On 02 Jun 2020, Lord Gareth said the following...
 
 LG> Hey Gluon,
 LG> 
 LG> Do you know of any resources on building Gopher sites?  I couldn't
 LG> figure out the Gopher blog script for Mystic but, I do still want to
 LG> create a Gopher site.
 LG> 
 LG> I have the server up and running but, no content.


Hey Lord Gareth,

I don't know of any tutorial like resource, but the beauty of Gopher is that
it is basically a distributed file system. No more, no less.

So if you have the server up and running already, the simplest way to add
content is to add some files/folders you'd like to share to the folder
specified as the root folder on the server. In a way, you can see Gopher as an
FTP server accessible through a Gopher browser. Or you can also compare it to
a website where there is no html but purely a tree of files/folders that are
served.

For instance, suppose you want to talk a little bit about you. You could
create a text file called "About Me.txt" and inside create some text
describing you. Further if you wanted to share your online contacts, you
could create a text file called "Contacts.txt" and fill it with your email,
username, phone, etc... Now, there's nothing stopping you from using other
file types, like for instance a folder called "My favourite music" with a
collection of mp3 files.

If creating a blog, or phlog in this case, is what you had in mind, then you
can have a folder called Phlog and then subfolders named by full date or
month like for instance "April", "May", "June". Inside these folders, you
could create text files to represent your posts, using the subject of the
post to name the files. Something like "How to join fsxNet using Mystic.txt".

You might be wondering about the extra text and formatting that you see in
many gopherholes, including mine at gopher://gopher.geeksphere.tk/. That is
just extra info that you may or may not use, to perhaps make your hole
unique. To achieve this you need to create a special file, called a
gophermap. A gophermap file has more or less the same function of a simple
index.html file as used in the 90s to create a simple annotated index of your
content. But of course, you can get creative and use even ANSI art inside
your gophermap. I use it myself to create a very simple "GEEK SPHERE" banner,
but there's a gopherhole that went as far as creating a solitaire game in
Gopher using ANSI art. :)

There's a nice site describing how to use gophermap files here:

https://gopher.zone/posts/how-to-gophermap/

I hope this message was helpful in some way and please feel free to ask me
any more questions about Gopher. As a final note, below you can see the file
tree for my personal gopherhole:

gluon@neptunium:~/var/gopher $ ls
about.txt  contacts.txt  gophermap      pastebin    sites
aircraft   doc           guestbook.txt  rfc         src
cgi-bin    extmap        notes          robots.txt  weather

---
Vasco aka Gluon

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Raspberry Pi/32)
 * Origin: Geek Sphere BBS (21:1/151)

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