Welcome to the Magical Phlog!

24 March, 2021

Magical Phlog?
How's that for a great name?  Meh. Probably not so great.

I've been thinking for a time that I should have a
way of communicating with you outside of the change.log,
file, somewhere I can get into a little more detail 
about things.

I hope you'll check in regularly to learn more
about Magical.fish/Magical.gopher.

The big news around here is the addition of certain
news feeds. I wanted to expand the news thats
available to gopherspace. I'm trying hard not
to duplicate anything thats already offered.

This project is in keeping with my goal of
always having something new here for you each 
day, because there's nothing quite as boring 
as a gopher hole that never changes.

For the magical news feeds project, I'm using
the Python module Newspaper3k. Thanks to
the wonderful Flask Gopher platform, its 
possible to do lots of processing and
dynamic text and file manipulation.

I have to say, nearly 3 years ago, after
writing a static gopher page, I nearly lost
interest in gopherspace and moved on. But
after discovering Flask Gopher, the
challenge became clear to me.  At the time
my python coding skills were practically
zero, and I had a big learning curve.
Fast forward to today, and I'm almost to
the point of being able to figure things
out for myself.

I'm very grateful to Michael Lazar for
fathering Flask Gopher and making so
many things possible in gopherspace.
Flask Gopher is at 
github.com/micheal-lazar/flask-gopher

What I enjoy about gopherspace is the small
community, and that a single person can
still make difference here. It reminds me of
the fun I had during the earliest days of
the web.  No hate to the www; had gopherspace
taken over the world, I'm pretty sure it 
also would have gone to hell just as quickly.

But it didn't, and so here we are. Lets
enjoy it and keep on hacking it, and carve 
out an interesting space to inhabit.