Installation:

Quick Start, on SDF:

mkgopher (setup)
wget http://slugmax.tx0.org/slerm-1.9.tgz
tar xvzf slerm-1.9.tgz
cd slerm-1.9
mkdir ~/gopher/cgi-bin
chmod 755 ~/gopher/cgi-bin
cp slerm.cgi ~/gopher/cgi-bin
cp -a dat ~/gopher
cd ~/gopher
chmod 755 cgi-bin/slerm.cgi
chmod 775 dat
perl -pi -e 's/USERNAME/your_username_here/' cgi-bin/slerm.cgi
lynx gopher://sdf.org/1/users/your_username_here/slerm.cgi

Make sure the script and dat directory's group owner is set to
whatever your server uses to run cgi scripts. This is 'nobody' on
SDF, and you should not need to do anything if you used 'mkgopher'
to setup your gopherspace.

Optional, or for other gopher servers:

Move or copy slerm.cgi and and the dat directory to the directory
you want your phlog to be in.

Make sure slerm.cgi is executable.  "chmod 755 slerm.cgi" should do
the trick.  You also need to make sure the program can write to the
dat directory, so it can write comments.  "chmod 775 dat" should
take care of that.  If you'd like, you can change the program's name
to something like "phlog.cgi" or "glog.cgi".  Depending on your
server's set up the ".cgi" may or may not be required.  If you don't
know, you should probably just leave it on.  If you want to change
the the program's type something like "mv slerm.cgi phlog.cgi",
replacing "phlog.cgi" with the name you wish to use.

Make sure the script and dat directory's group owner is set to
whatever your server uses to run cgi scripts.  This is often
"nobody".  A simple "chgrp nobody slerm.cgi dat" should do the
trick.  If you're on sdf, unpacking everything into your gopher
directory should do it.

Now it's time to do some light editing of slerm.cgi.  If you're not
running slerm on sdf.org, you'll need to change the very first line
of the the program; this will probably work: "#!/usr/bin/perl -w".

If you've changed the program's name let it know by changing the
$name variable to match.

Again if you're not on running this at the Super Dimensional
Fortress, you'll need to change $server to match your server's
internet address.

You probably don't need to change $port, unless you know your server
is using a different port.  If you don't know what that means, leave
it be.

Next you'll need to edit $base_dir to correspond to path your server
will send to clients.  If you're on sdf, just replace USERNAME with
(you guessed it) your username.  On other servers, this will likely
be different.

Then you can edit $dir to make sure it is a full path to the
directory in which you store your posts and your header.txt,
footer.txt and div.txt files. If you're on sdf, you shouldn't need
to edit this.

Change $EMAIL_COMMENTS to 1 to enable an email alert whenever a
comment is posted to your phlog. Make sure $comment_email is the
correct recipient email address.

Change $COMMENT_ORDER_REVERSE to 1 to force comments to be stored
newest first. By default, slerm will order comments in the more
natural oldest first.

You can change the extension used to indicate posts by editing the
variable '$post_ext' in the script header. For example, set this to
'txt', if you have your editor configured to handle text files
specially (e.g. text-mode in Emacs).

Edit the $permalink_text variable to change the text displayed when
linking to individual posts. By default this is "View Post or
Comment... (NN)". 'NN' will be replaced by the number of comments at
run-time.

Finally, you can edit $max_posts do decide how many posts slerm will
display per page.

Once you're done getting slerm set up, just link to it as if it were
a directory, item type 1.

In a gophermap file that would look something like this:

1Phlog	/users/USERNAME/slerm.cgi

With the requisite tab (no spaces) between '1Phlog' and
'/users/...'.

Note : In emacs, you can enter a literal TAB character in your
editing buffer by typing <ctrl>-q TAB. In vi/vim, from insert mode
use <ctrl-v> TAB.

Once it's up and running, consult USAGE to start writing posts, or
just look at the example post in the dat directory, it is called
'post.post'.
