## title: My Gopherspace garden
## date: "2026-01-08"
## Introduction
Recently, I went back into Gopherspace and saw websites like
baud.baby with the phlog named FAX SEX. I found it very
elegant and inspiring, so I immersed myself in this
universe.
(HTM) Gopherspace
(DIR) baud.baby
I want to modify my gph files that reflect my website
theobori.cafe. These files had been automatically translated
with a shell script that transforms Markdown into gph. It
was syntactically correct, but the format was not very
elegant.
(HTM) theobori.cafe
## My goal
My primary goal is to refactor my Gopher files. To do this,
I want to create a dedicated project that will produce a CLI
capable of translating Markdown with a bit of HTML into
gophermap, gph and txt. It's common to see files with these
formats in Gopherspace.
In particular, I'd like to manually modify the home page and
the index page for blog posts.
## Project lueur
This project is called lueur, pronounced \lɥœʁ\, which is a
French word for vivid, momentary expression.
### How it works
The way the project works is deliberately very simple: I
retrieve the text in Markdown format, which can contain
HTML. The text is then passed to the Markdown parser, which
returns an AST that is traversed to produce the final
output. The goldmark project was used to parse the Markdown
and the Go Networking project for the HTML.
(HTM) goldmark
(HTM) Go Networking
### Contributing
The project is under construction. Anyone is free to
contribute to the source code. For more details, please
visit the GitHub repository.
(HTM) GitHub repository
## Rewriting my files
I automated the rewriting of my files with the lueur
project, it helped me transform my blog posts from Markdown
format to gph format.
However, I wrote the home page, i.e. the index.gph file, and
the posts.gph file by hand. Here's what these two pages look
like on my website through the Gopher client Gophie. Below
is the home page.
(HTM) Gophie
/my-gph-homepage.png
(IMG) /my-gph-homepage.png
And below the blog posts index.
/my-gph-posts.png
(IMG) /my-gph-posts.png
## Why use Gopher
One might ask why use Gopher in 2026, whether to write a
phlog, art, intimde diary or anything else. In my opinion,
the author of baud.baby explains it perfectly in this post.
As he says, for older people it may be nostalgia for old
technologies, others like the simplicity of the protocol and
file format.
(DIR) baud.baby
(TXT) post
I also think that people like to be able to express
themselves in a secret place, away from the general public.
## Why I use Gopher
I like the fact that it's a remote corner of the Internet
that's hard to get to. I think it makes the experience
interesting. It's rare for someone to stumble across a
Gopher website by chance; you have to be curious and often
passionate.
The community aspect appeals to me, in fact most of the
Gopher servers currently running are managed by pubnixes,
and my files are themselves behind the tilde.pink server.
(HTM) tilde.pink
I also like the fact that Gopher websites are only consumed
by humans, because the companies that scrap the content of
websites aren't really interested in this protocol. It's too
little used and it wouldn't be profitable for them.
The Gopher protocol and the documents it carries are very
light. I find it more interesting to concentrate on content
rather than form, unlike most modern HTML pages which are
highly stylized and carry a lot of elements for the web
browser to load. For my personal website, I want this
workload to be very low.
I like this simplicity.
## End of my gemtext files maintenance
I also really like the Gemini protocol, but I'd rather
concentrate exclusively on Gopher, so I've deleted my old
gemtext files and will only be maintaining my gph files. I
will still continue to consume content through Gemini but
for the time being I won't be producing any more.
(HTM) Gemini
## Conclusion
I love Gopher and its ecosystem more than ever, and I intend
to keep my little part of Gopherspace up to date.