I spent Saturday morning setting up a Prosody XMPP server on
my home LAN. It wasn't that difficult to set up and
configure using the docs available on Prosody's own website.
With my phone and laptop logged in the main process used
about 50MB. I don't know how much the memory consumption
increases as more users are added, but I read somewhere that
it uses about 1MB per connected device. The real test would
have to come with actual use by a number of users. It
definitely seems like something that could be done with a
Ramnode VPS and a Let's Encrypt certificate.

On Sunday morning, I got the idea that I could write a bash
script to dump the links from a web page (LXer.com) as text
files into /var/gopher/whatever to mirror the site, which I
read on a daily basis. Sadly, I don't know enough to follow
the example here[1], so I scoured the internet looking for
examples and reading commands, and the result is below. As a
proof of concept, it works, but could be improved greatly by
adding an automated gophermap creation section and
developing some means of removing the page headers, either
before or after dumping them to text.

You can see the results at gopher://gopher.visiblink.ca

------------------------------------------------------------

#!/bin/bash

# To clear the gopher directory (since I'm running the
# script daily as a cron job)

rm /var/gopher/LXer/*

# To get a list of links from the LXer page (I put the
# script in /opt/LXer and used that as my working directory)

lynx --dump http://lxer.com/module/newswire/mobile.php | awk '/http/{print $2}' | grep http > /opt/LXer/file.txt

# To dump the links to text files

for i in $( cat /opt/LXer/file.txt ); do lynx --dump -nonumbers -nolist -width 60 $i > /var/gopher/LXer/"${i////_}"; done

# To remove any unwanted dumped links (on a more complicated
# page with a great number of regular headers this would be a
# long list. Definitely not the best way of doing this, but
# I'm not sure how to automate the process)

rm /var/gopher/LXer/http:__lxer.com_

------------------------------------------------------------

I left the script lines unwrapped in case anyone ever wants
to cut and paste.

Other than that, it was a quiet weekend. I drove about an
hour to have lunch with my Dad on his birthday. It was an
absolutely gorgeous day, clear and cold. Couldn't have
asked for a nicer weekend. Now it's back to the grind for
another week.

[1] https://github.com/julienXX/gophsters