Running Down a Gopherhole
2016-02-15
My recent experiments with mutt and the command line
continue. I've been trying newsbeuter[1] recently, and been
getting some help from the current admins in their IRC Channel to
make it work. Without going into detail, to make it work with
newsblur, you need to explicitly set a cookie cache file in the
configuration, and the cache filepath **must** be given in full,
no `~/path`, and the cookie file **must** exist[^1].
When I mentioned the previous blogpost on my local friendly
`#linux` channel, my friend Kevin Lyda mentioned a project he
had embarked upon[2] to get the old VMS `BULLETIN` software
working on Linux. Noodling around in his project, and in
particular the arcane instructions to get VMS working in a
virtual machine[3], reminded me forcefully of the days when I
used a VAX terminal client, and that reminded me of Gopher.
Gopher, for those who don't know, was briefly the future of
computing. It was an application which was used to serve files
over TCP/IP, like Telnet or FTP, but, unlike them, it was
_strongly_ oriented to a menu/document design. For a vanishingly
brief period in the early 1990s, it was thought to be the way
that information was going to be shared between computers.
Things didn't quite work out that way, however, as at just the
same time that Mark McCahill at the University of Michigan was
preparing Gopher for release to the World, over in Switzerland,
Tim Berners Lee and Robert Caillou were working on their own,
quite different hypertext protocol.
Gopher was designed with an eye on providing a quick method of
providing Campus-Wide Information in institutions of higher
learning, and it quickly spread across American campuses. While
it did have a menuing system, it was very much a text-based
system, designed around the limitations of the aforementioned VAX
client terminals and the like. It was very much a _curated_
system, in that every document had to have a defined format and
type, and the user had to navigate through strictly defined
hierarchical trees to get particular items of informaton.
What made Gopher so appealing, however, was that once you had the
location for a file, anywhere in gopherspace, you could **link**
to that file from any other document in gopherspace. This was,
for me at the time, an utter revelation; I'd been raised on the
BBS system, where you had to go to a specific place to access a
specific file, and often couldn't access the location due to the
limited phone lines available. This was so different, with
everything on gopherspace being accessible all the time. There
was even a search engine for gopher, imaginatively called
Veronica[^2], which was a database of all accessible gopher
pages. The whole world suddenly opened to me in ways I had only
dreamt of, or read of in sf like Neuromancer.
All too soon (or so it seemed) the NCSA Mosaic browser came along
which gave access to gopher sites on xwindows running on UNIX
machines. This was a massive improvement over the terminal
systems, as you could style your own defaults for the windows
showing the text. More importantly, thanks to multitasking and
floppy disks, you could **cough** _borrow_ **cough** content that
you found for your own computer! Mosaic also gave access to this
new HTML thing, but the markup was weird and bizarre.
At about the same time, the University of Michigan, in what must
be one of the most short-sighted moves ever, issued their
infamous March 1993 Bulletin[4]. I didn't see that at the time
(what with studying for finals and all) but when I got back to
the college computers in late 1993, _everyone_[^3] knew that
gophers were going to be subject to a licence fee, and maybe this
Hypertext Markup isn't so hard after all. After all, we already
knew Mosaic, which was going to be released for Windows any day
now.
That was, for me, the end of Gopherspace. I rewrote my personal
bookmarks list in HTML[^4] and started adding new content from
the 'Web'. I don't think I'd even thought about it much until I
read kevin's Readme file on his project.
Once I'd thought about it, however, I had to go read about it. I
was amazed to find that there is still a Gopher community of
sorts out there. Wikipedia informs me that as of 2012 there were
**160** gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2. One **Hundred** and
Sixty. I had links to more servers in my bookmarks file.
The University of Michigan GPLd their server software in
2000, and now there are servers written in much more modern
languages. After a few false starts, I settled on PyGopherd[5]
which, while it hasn't seen any updates since 8 years ago, has
the twin advantages of being stable and written in the one
computing language I have any competency in.
I managed to get the server installed fairly easily, but
writing content was much harder. Put simply, I'd completely
forgotten the server-file-client architecture and how to make my
site appear as something more than just a bare directory of
links. Unsuprisingly, documentation on this feature has vanished
from the modern internet.
The modern solution is to use a file called `gophermap`, which is
respected by the main server software, including, luckily,
PyGopherd. A gophermap allows you to provide links for your
content, or indeed any content anywhere in gopherspace or the
internet. The format is somewhat tricky, but the main gophermap
for my site, and remember, these are all plain text files, is:
.___ ___ __ _______
| | |__|.-----.--.--.--. | ___|.----.-----.--------.
| | | || -__| | | | | ___|| _| _ | |
.\_____/|__||_____|________| |___| |__| |_____|__|__|__|
._______
| _ |.-----.----.----.---.-.-----.--.--.-----.
| ||__ --| __| _| _ | -__| | |__ --|
|___|___||_____|____|__| |___._|_____|_____|_____|.org
Hi, and welcome to my gopher phlog. All content can also be
seen on the internet.
1Things Fall Apart /entries/things-fall-apart
1Cast Away /entries/cast-away
A trained gopher user will see straight away that I'm cheating
madly. I have each of my blog entries being served as a
distinct gopher directory, not as a _file_ per se. In the
directory for each blog entry, I am serving another `gophermap`
file. The reason for this is very simple: links. A text file in
gopherspace is just that - a text file without adornment. You
can't have links in a text file, and, as any reader of this
meandering thought experiment knows, I tend to use links for
everything. Even within a gophermap, you can't _hotlink_ in the
body text, a link is a separate line, with a specific syntax,
with a declaration of filetype as the first character. The only
workaround is to use the gophermap in the directory, collecting
all the links at the end of the file.
Browsing around the existing gopherspace, such as it exists, I
noticed that most gopher sites, at least all the decent ones,
tend to stick fairly closely to a 67-character line-length in
some homage to the old terminal systems. To 'fit in' with the
gopher people, I'd have to find some way of shortening my
lines. I tried the venerable `fmt` command, but this is a
fairly blunt instrument, chopping up words to fit the desired
width. I looked around and found a quite wonderful, if utterly
head-melting, little program caled `par`.
The author of this program freely admits that his documentation
skills are somewhat lacking [6], but after a lot of
experimentation, I finally found an option to reformat my
paragraphs to a width of 65 characters, preserving quote marks,
reflowing quote marks over multiple lines, and, most importantly
from my perspective, justifying the text[^5].
The results of this experimentation can be seen at
gopher://ascraeus.org. To access that, you'll either have to
use a gopher-aware browser, like the venerable still-maintained
lynx [8], or use a gopher proxy, like this one[7]. I don't know
how long I'll keep doing that, by the way, although I have
managed to script an amount of the repetitive work.
I'd recommend you to try getting lynx working on your
own computer and accessing the gopherspace in its natural
environment, the commandline, somehow it seems more honest to do
it that way.
________References________________________________________________
[1] http://newsbeuter.org/
[2] https://github.com/lyda/bulletin
[3] http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html
[4] http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-software-licensing-policy.ancient
[5] https://github.com/jgoerzen/pygopherd
[6] http://www.nicemice.net/par/
[7] http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fascraeus.org
[8] http://lynx.invisible-island.net/
________Feetneet__________________________________________________
[^1] I'll write all this up some other time
[^2] Something to do with some apalling american newspaper comic
[^3] Everyone who knew their way to the hidden computer lab, and
knew how to figure out the commerce-students *default*
passwords for their unused unix accounts!
[^4] Most of the links were still gopher links. Scripting the
change from the gopher `1Desc \titem\tserver\tport` to the
new `gopher://server:port/item` was an education in itself
[^5] ragged edges in text files drive me to distraction
+++ENDS+++