+------------------------------------------------------------------
+title:  Should I move back to plaintext pages?
+date:   Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:33:23 +0200
+author: -fab- fab@redterminal.org
+------------------------------------------------------------------

Around two  or three weeks ago  I changed my tooling  for my gopher
content  to  create  gophermaps  instead  of  plaintext  files  for
"pages". It always annoyed me that I couldn't use links in a normal
way in my posts.  And it was really some work  to change my scripts
for creating the  phlog index and RSS feed files  to use gophermaps
instead of plaintext files, every page in its own directory.

Don't get me wrong! I still mostly create my Gopher pages manually,
the converting into  real gophermaps is done  by gophernicus, which
adds a filetype "i" to each line  and completes "h" type URLs to be
understood  by _most_  Gopher clients.  My generation  scripts just
create the phlog index, the RSS feed and add a header and footer to
my pages. And  I was happy that  my scripts were finally  the way I
wanted them!

But shortly after my  first (just a test) or second  post, I got an
email from Anna from SDF, telling  me, that she can't read my posts
anymore because she was using  the UMN Gopher client, which doesn't
seem to understand the "new" "i" filetype in gophermaps.

I told her, that I'm sorry if I lose her as a reader, and asked her
to change browsers,  because even if I don't have  many readers and
don't consider my content as "high  quality", I still want at least
some people read my babble. But  at that point I really didn't want
to roll back my tooling with all it's conveniences.

I also  told her, that  James Tomasinos tool "burrow"  also creates
gophermaps as Gopher pages, and he's a much more heard voice in the
Gopher community than "newcomer" me.

But then  after following some thread  in comp.infosystems.gopher I
found out, that a lot of  the long-established Gopher people are of
the same opinion  like Anna, and argued for  separate gophermaps as
phlog index and plaintext files as readable pages.

So now I'm not that sure  anymore. On one hand reworking my tooling
was at least some work and reverting  it back would also mean a lot
of changes again and now I can  have nice links in my pages, and on
the other  hand it seems I  lose at least some  readers which would
read my  pages if  they were simple  plaintext files,  because they
don't like to move to some  more modern Gopher client or have other
reasons.

So it  seems I'm really on  the fence regarding this.  Personally I
still want  to use gophermaps  with all  its niceties, but  I don't
want to  break with the  "old" communitys unwritten rules  and thus
perhaps losing some of my already few readers. So what should I do?
Keeping it like it is now or moving back to plaintext pages?

I really don't know.

All in all - Have fun!
-fab-