About ===== So what is this? As I said in the welcome page (pess the right arrow to see it again, I won't judge) this is my personal Gopher site, I made this as a sort of way to express whatever in the world I feel like expressing, which can vary a lot as time goes on, to the internet at large, or at least as many people who have even feel like using this old protocol, which if you are (judging as you're reading this) congratulations! You are officially part of the Cool Kids club! Why am I using this old protocol? --------------------------------- First of all this is simple, and I like simple things, particularly the code that makes up gopher pages is quite alike to the text I write when making this, making the process of just rambling on a whole lot easier. Also I don't have to bother with making the page look nice beyond the text itself, which is a nice thing as I suck at CSS. Is that a crutch? Yes it is! Will I do something about it? Heck no. Your gopher client can take care of making this look like whatever you wish for it to look like, which in my opinion is a huge win for the final user. There are a few more reasons why I prefer this protocol to good old HTTP, whilst yes I could just make an academic looking HTML page, and host is in a regular HTTP server, I would still have a degree of separation between what I make and what the user sees, that or I would have to write my text <p>like this</p> which in my opinion looks terrible to me, and it's default look is also quite bad. Why do you write in 80 columns? ------------------------------- As before, it's a style choise, I am not a huge fan of pages that extend to infinity horizontally, as to me they become quite difficult to read, the fact I suffer from dyslexia which makes the text feel all janky and wavy when the lines get too long doesn't help. Furthermore, 80 wide text (or variations such as 90 and 120 column- text) looks great in terminals, at least in my opnion, and it helps give it that hacker-esque kind of feel. What's up with the sections? ---------------------------- This format whilst being valid gopher code, happens to look much like rst (re-structured text), this format is mainly used to document software projects, it is quite similar to other markup formats (like the .md markup format) but much like my opinion on 80-wide text, I feel it happens to look better in it's source form, it also can be compiled using the `docutils` tool to HTML, LaTEX or whatever one likes.