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Surfing the Gopherspace
- mninm 4y agoThere is a video game wiki gopher hole that I use occasionally. gopher://giantgopher.com/ is a gopher front end for GiantBomb.com but with what I find to be a better search interface. There aren't a whole lot of good Gopher browsers out there for Windows. I use http://jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows http://jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows with the text color set to green and the background set to black. From what I hear there is also a Gopher chrome plugin that isn't too bad. For those interested in playing around with gopher development in addition to the tools that are mentioned in the the article there is an old abandoned yet serviceable gopher version of flask kicking around out there that is quick and easy to get going.
- lnx01 4y agoCheck out Lagrange, it's actually a browser for Geminispace but works perfectly well for gopher: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
- Jaruzel 4y agoThanks for giving my Gopher client a shout-out! :)
- throwaway742 4y agoThese kind of interactions are why I love HN.
- mninm 4y agoThank you for making free software!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoIs there other non-web streamable UI software besides gopher?
- weberer 4y agoThere's also Gemini, which is like a modern version of Gopher. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
- soapdog 4y agoGemini ecosystem is quite active. There other smaller protocols as well, all part of the "small web" or "small internet" movement. I wrote a bit about Gemini recently[2]. If you're curious about it, you might want to give it a read. I've implemented some of them in my little toy browser Fafi[1]. If you want a browser with more features and more polish you can check Lagrange[3], it also supports Gopher and Finger besides Gemini. [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~soapdog/fafi-browser https://git.sr.ht/~soapdog/fafi-browser [2]: https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/gemini-is-a-little-gem.html https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/gemini-is-a-little-gem.html [3]: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
- peatmoss 4y agoLove that you implemented Fafi in Racket. Seems like a perfect use!
- blippage 4y agoGemini seems to be the land of broken clients. I tried amfora recently, and it gave a fatal error. I futzed around with other clients in the past, and they all seemed to have problems of their own.
- trh0awayman 4y agoI suggest trying Lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
- ilaksh 4y agohttps://github.com/runvnc/tersenet https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet
- Sembiance 4y agoYou can even play solitaire on gopher: gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/ Blog post about it: https://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2019/06/14/solitaire-over-gopher/ https://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2019/06/14/solitaire-over-goph...
- whatrocks 4y agoDefinitely going to try this next!
- mninm 4y agogopher://worldofsolitaire.com/ This gopher hole is a good example of how Gopher doesn't have an notion of cookies. You can see what is either gamestate or some sort of session id encoded in the URL. Another way to do this kind of thing is to generate "parallel universes". It involves generating enough gopher "directories" AKA "pages" to encode every possible game state and then link them together like you would a "Choose Your Own Adventure". Essentially trading dynamic page generation for hard drive space. You can see an example of the "parallel universes" approach used in the easter egg text adventure game located at: gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/--/Winnifred_Huck
- FerretFred 4y agoYay for Gopher! I've been running one for a few years now and get several hundred (human) visitors a week - not bad for an "obsolete" protocol. The speed and freedom from ads is a real plus!
- whatrocks 4y agoShare a link! I’d love to check it out.
- FerretFred 4y agoSure! It's gopher.petergarner.net or if you want to see the file collection on the web (it's the same file area) go to https://petergarner.net/gopherspace/index.php https://petergarner.net/gopherspace/index.php
- whatrocks 4y agoVery cool! I'd like to set up something similar myself one of these days.
- loydb 4y agoHe remembers the Old Ways.
- davidwritesbugs 4y agoIs there a reasonable use for gopher nowadays, or is it just 'retro cool'?
- xena 4y agoI think that as people get older there's an increasing desire for things to be simple again. This will never happen of course, but it can be useful to have a small island of simplicity to go back to every so often.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- davidwritesbugs 4y agoVery perceptive and I tend to agree.
- FerretFred 4y agoPersonally speaking .. with a perceived growing trend towards using low(er) power hardware - planning for dystopian power shortages etc - I know that I can host a reasonable server on a Raspberry Pi and still have it working effectively. I had mine running on a Pi2B for quite a while, but with the introduction of the Pi Zero 2 and the addition of an ethernet HAT, that's also a viable device. The size of the gopher files library will be determined by the USB stick you can afford.
- weberer 4y agoBrowsing text files online without needing a browser that eats up gigabytes of memory for javascript sandboxing.
- iJohnDoe 4y agoThe Gemini protocol is also pretty cool and worth checking out. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)