49 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
49 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
layout: post
|
|
title: Gopher it
|
|
tags:
|
|
- gopher
|
|
- opinion
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
The web is getting faster but feeling slower, something which I have
|
|
complained about loudly on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/agentdero) but now
|
|
some folks have put together [data to back it
|
|
up](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/). The web is
|
|
simultaneously a medium to transmit documents (e.g. an article) and an
|
|
application platform (e.g. Jira). Anecdotally it seems to me like far too many
|
|
publishers think of the web only as the _latter_. There are more and more
|
|
websites which require significant JavaScript or other multimedia resources to
|
|
render what ends up being a few paragraphs of text. If you don't believe me,
|
|
just visit the website for your local television news station with
|
|
[NoScript](https://noscript.net/) turned on. In my own way, I have been
|
|
resisting this push by keeping this blog as barebones as neceessary to present
|
|
the content you're reading now. On a whim, I recently took this idea a little
|
|
bit further by deploying a [Gopher site](gopher://gopher.brokenco.de/) (viewable over HTTP via [a proxy](https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fgopher.brokenco.de)).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
[Gopher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)) is old, somewhat
|
|
primitive, but still captures my interest because of those qualities. By and
|
|
large I have filled up my gopher site with this blog content, a couple other
|
|
text files, and archives of some of my video presentations which I
|
|
downloaded from YouTube.
|
|
|
|
When I first started tinkering around with the idea, I was absolutely floored
|
|
by how fast content was loading via some of the Gopher sites I was visiting,
|
|
even over [Tor](https://torproject.org) the responsiveness of sending a few
|
|
kilobytes cannot be understated.
|
|
|
|
I do not plan on publishing too much content "exclusively" via Gopher, since
|
|
HTTP is where most things on the internet are happening these days. I have
|
|
however set up an automatic publishing pipeline for my blog and other content
|
|
to automatically go to [gopher.brokenco.de](gopher://gopher.brokenco.de) once
|
|
it has been committed.
|
|
|
|
Personally I find [elinks](http://elinks.or.cz/) to be a good Gopher client,
|
|
though others [do exist](https://github.com/xvxx/phetch). If you're interested
|
|
in exploring some of the content that lives on the interview via Gopher, I
|
|
recommend starting at [gopherproject.org](gopher://gopherproject.org). Have
|
|
fun! :)
|
|
|