Gopher Subscriptions - 5 Febuary 2018
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Well  I  said  that I would mainly be talking about computer stuff in my
first phlog post, so I guess it is a good time to finally do that.

Recently,  the  phlog  listings  for  sdf  have been changed; Instead of
ordering  phlogs  in  chronological  order,   it   now   orders   phlogs
alphabetically,  which  I  hate SO MUCH! I want to read recent stuff not
stuff that was posted in 2003.

I want to be able to see the latest stuff, so I wrote  a  little  script
today  to  list  this month's phlog posts on my main page.  It is pretty
simple really, curl fethches the main listing and then grep filters  out
everything with "Feb-2018" in it, then it gets sorted.

I originally wanted to sort all the listed phlogs in chronological order
like it used to be listed, but I lack the technical skills to make  that
happen  with  a  shell script, and I'm too lazy to write a program to do
it. Listing this month's stuff seems good enough for me.

Anyways, Solderpunk[1] mentioned  gopher  subscriptions  in  his  latest
post,  and  that's  what  I  wanted to talk about today. I find the idea
really interesting and I might make it a future project of mine.

In my mind there are two potential  types  of  gopher  subscriptions,  a
'static' subscription and a 'recursive' subscription.

A  static subscription is where you subscribe to an individual gophermap
and get notified when that gophermap changes. This could be  implemented
very  simply,  you  just  store  a  file of urls with corresponding hash
values.  This is the kind of subscription that moku pona[2] uses.

This kind of subscription is very simple, but it would get  tedious  for
phlogs like mine that divide things up by month and year. If a new month
rolled around you wouldn't be notified of new phlogs because I would put
the new phlogs into a different (unsubscribed) directory.

A  recursive subscription would take a root server or phlog and generate
a heiracrchy of urls to check. This would  be  much  more  difficult  to
implement,  as  you  have  to be careful with outbound links and cirular
links (like a "go back" link), but it could be tremendously useful.

I would like to see a gopher client implement  a  subscription  feature,
but  it  would have to implement both static and recursive subscriptions
to be practical. Maybe I'll make a gopher client, I could even throw  in
some url detecetion features.

-- Auzymoto

[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/on-bungled-listings.txt
[2] https://github.com/kensanta/moku-pona#moku-pona