GOPHHUB AGAIN

Well it took most of the week but I've pretty much recovered from 
my holiday now. A note for future train holidays: Sitting on the 
train most of a day doesn't exactly equal the same relaxation of 
sitting at home having a restful recovery day before plunging into 
the forgotten routines of the week ahead. I mean it's nice, but I'm 
always a bit on edge so long as other people are around. I need a 
train with a private compartment really. Nah, a private carriage, 
that's what I need. Where's a nice royal family I can marry into 
then? Preferably an eccentric one out of a 1950s movie.

Well anyway, settling back into my routines naturally turned into 
tinkering with GophHub again. In spite of zero expressed interest 
from users, even including myself, I still wanted it to work 
completely via a Web-Gopher proxy. The Floodgap one worked OK, but 
HTML is blocked by it. Various other proxies have trouble with the 
parameters in the Gopher URL, because they presumably try to 
interpret those themselves. But the Tildeverse proxy and the one at 
ratthing.com ("what thing?", "Rat thing...", [SCREAMS]) only had 
trouble with the 'search' for the GitHub URL. For some reason it 
wouldn't go through.

Those proxies already pissed me off by pointlessly requiring 
Javascript for the search box, which could easily be done in HTML 
instead. But then I discovered another one, not really hiding at 
the domain gopherproxy.net, and this doesn't use Javascript but 
otherwise has the same problem with the submission of the GitHub 
URL as the Tildeverse and Ratthing proxies. So I looked into it and 
it turns out these proxies percent-encode some characters in the 
search strings when they're submitted.

I suspect this is a bit wrong for Gopher search items in general, 
but as I was actually accepting a URL I really should have been 
handling percent-encoded characters already anyway. Plus it 
actually turned out to be easily done with Bash built-ins just by 
switching '%' to '\x' and then using printf to do the conversion:

 SEARCHREQUEST="$(printf '%b' "${SEARCHREQUEST//%/\\x}")"

So GophHub v1.1 is now at least a little more proxy-friendly, and 
available to web-locked users at the recommended proxy link here:
http://gopherproxy.net/tilde.club/1/~freet/gophhub

The grumpy author of that proxy lives at 0x1bi.net and actually has 
his own separate gripes about GitHub, which I agree with too, 
although really I'd be happy if people just mirrored their code 
somewhere else if they really feel they have to jump into bed with 
M$ or other Javascript-enforcing organisations:
gopher://0x1bi.net/0/harmful/programming/Github.txt

GophHub is still of course open directly to real Gophers here:
gopher://tilde.club/1/~freet/gophhub

And available for download in the Scripts section:
gopher://aussies.space/9/~freet/scripts/gophhub-1.1.tar.gz

One day I'll look back at this thinking how silly I was to try and 
fight the inevitable direction of the Web, or how silly I was to 
bother using it or participating in society in general. But oh 
well, I'll be married to princess Foritzergrad of Intembickertania 
by then and everything will be rosy.

UPDATE 2023-10-17:

The author of the multi-protocol proxy at portal.mozz.us, which I
hadn't found earlier, let me know that it works great with GophHub
as well. It doesn't even try to trip me up by percent-encoding
characters in search strings! So that's another excellent option:
http://portal.mozz.us/gopher/tilde.club/1/~freet/gophhub

 - The Free Thinker

PS. My list of known, currently-up, Web-Gopher proxies:

http://portal.mozz.us/
http://gopherproxy.net/
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
https://gopher.tildeverse.org/
https://gp.ratthing.com/

Not GophHub-friendly:
https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/
http://codemadness.org/gopherproxy/