Post AzQwvpiNE2RQ9UnbDE by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
(DIR) More posts by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
(DIR) Post #AzQ4CavJyd5bippogq by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-21T02:10:30Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Speaking of gopherspace, it appears that the single most amazing gopher site ever, wiretap.spies.com, was never archived. What a shame. I'm not liking having to think in terms that gophermap requires. It's really haphazard. Crazy things are allowed or required. A single trailing tab character? Really? The rules are awful, worse than Hollerith FORTRAN. We need a translation program, that takes some canonical and rational textual format, using keywords and commas, that spits out a gophermap. Or a whole tree. The mappings would be trivial. I might write one but it will be in perl.
(DIR) Post #AzQ5BjtzD3ZFEVMmQq by andybaio@xoxo.zone
2025-10-21T02:21:30Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings you may already know, but there's a partial mirror of it here http://gopher.quux.org:70/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com
(DIR) Post #AzQ5EypKAyGkOFjOZU by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
2025-10-21T02:22:03.224818Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings > I might write one but it will be in perl.Probably a decent choice, quite stable language and ecosystem after all. At least I ended up picking perl after years of wrestling with python's churn and not seeing ruby as any better about that.
(DIR) Post #AzQ7rw4CZUCB23OQuO by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2025-10-21T02:51:23Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings haha. it took 2 weeks to write a gophermap generator that ate bug (my homebrewed markup language) and barfed out gophermapsof course, there are like 19 different gophermap formats and none of them is canonical. i just picked the one that looked the least stupid
(DIR) Post #AzQ8V179jpGLysPVPU by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2025-10-21T02:58:27Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings haha. for my site generator software kiki, it took 2 weeks to write a gophermap generator that ate bug (my homebrewed markup language) and barfed out gophermaps.of course, there are like 19 different gophermap formats and none of them is canonical. i just picked the one that looked the least stupidthe worst part, i think, was that you're generally expected to specify the file format (text, binary, otherwise) of each link. i wrote a function that detected it based on file extension, but that was honestly one big guessing game.writing the translator gave me the distinct feeling that gopher sucks, has always sucked, and that i shouldn't try to make bad things good.
(DIR) Post #AzQMtyf5OR84yJ4q6i by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-21T05:40:02Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@andybaio Oh wow didn't know. Searching reminded me about area.com, but I've of course forgotten all details.There's so many reasons it didn't or couldn't be archived externally, but it's a shame. I will go through that tomorrow. Thanks!
(DIR) Post #AzQNtsReberDe4JJ1E by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-21T05:51:13Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@vga256 Lol this is my second and more serious bout with messing with it. It is pretty ugly. It claims to need to know file type but any of them deliver any file; it's to make up for server provided meta data like html includes more cleanly, IMG src= etc. But yeah some of that could be easily automated, as you did. There's claims it's "more efficient" but that seems empty, html is not the source of clog on the web. My hand carved html is as fast as anything gets and it's commented for fucks sake. 2K of text is not faster than 20K of text or even 200K. Who cares. But I think I will take it to conclusion and write the converter or at least bring up one small site. Then I want to look at Gemini. I'm curious....
(DIR) Post #AzQwvpiNE2RQ9UnbDE by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2025-10-21T12:23:33Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings that's exactly it. after all that coding I ended up with "so what exactly have I gained here beyond html, aside from running on an obscure port#?"
(DIR) Post #AzSO9o8wkxbFFl4nT6 by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-22T05:03:31Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@vga256 Well I wanted to refamiliarize with how it assembled the presentation of data. It's just too rigid, nothing inline, except for interstitial text every datum requires a click. And it's just branching hierarchy. The "nothing inline" (eg images) made sense in the early 90s. My oldest web pages worked that way, often I used a tiny thumbnail and stated the size of the file often mere tens of kbytes. But with the mildest of discipline with html, some attention to structure and file size, html can do everything just as well. And isn't required to be so strictly hierarchical. My websites are mostly ok with links browser. I think I'm gonna consider that enough.
(DIR) Post #AzSy5qNm5OdvOCQAwS by scott@mastodon.clitheroe.ca
2025-10-22T11:46:08Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings @vga256 2k of text is a lot faster than 20k over 300 baud packet radio 📻. We measure latency in seconds in that world :)I do agree, gopher is the nasty side of old tech we don't talk about - and is also where I think Gemini strikes a nice middle ground - small, but sane and in the clear spirit of gopher.
(DIR) Post #AzT6plpU95kMDqnELQ by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2025-10-22T13:23:55Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings i also counted passing the links/w3m test as good enough for kiki.