________  ________  ________
   2018-02-07                                   /        \/        \/    /   \
                                               /       __/         /_       _/
   At  times I find being part  of a highly-  /        _/         /         /
technical community  a  little  frustrating.  \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
While  I  am  interested  in   software  and    /        \/        \/    /   \
technology  I'm  far  more interested in the   /        _/         /_       _/
people involved, so to me post after post of  /-        /        _/         /
dry   hardware   catalogs    and    software  \________/\________/\___/____/
preferences can get a bit tedious.

   That is of course completely subjective and by no means me trying to impose
on anyone to do anything but what they want to do, I'm certain there are a lot
of people in the gopher community that find my scattered, long-winded lifelogs
just as, if not more tiresome.

   The flip side of that is  that being part of a technically minded community
means  shit  really gets done and there's no finer  example at the moment than
the phlogosphere listings.

   After launching gopher.club some changes were made to the phlogs listing on
SDF and they were no longer ordered based on when they were last listed by the
phlog owner, instead they  were ordered  by last edit, meaning anyone  who did
anything  to their gopher  directory whether it was a phlog  post  or not  was
bumped to the top and now they're ordered alphabetically.

   There was  some grumbling of  course  but there were  a lot of  people just
diving right in  and rolling up alternatives to the phlogosphere list. Ulcer's
top  list[1]  was  the first  I saw, with a  straight up  replacement  for the
existing list  and I've seen a shorter,  monthly-list from  auzymoto[2]  and a
neat  list  from  slugmax[3] that returns  the 40 most recent phlogs, based on
updates to a gopher hole's root gophermap.

   More outside-the-box is kensanata's Moku Pona[4] which essentially lets you
nominate a list  of gopher spaces to monitor for updates and returns a list of
them  ordered  by most  recently  updated,  kind  of like  a user-configurable
bongusta. I think  this  one is especially interesting  because you could  add
gopher holes from anywhere in gopherspace, not just the SDF gopher.club.

   Finally, worth  a  read  is tomasino's ideas  for  an  aggregator[5]  which
outlines  the  requirements for what sounds like the  perfect aggregator. What
particularly stood out for me is checking for  phlog's gophermap,  similar  to
slugmax's list and having the link in the aggregator link  to the post itself,
rather than the user's gopher space. Ideally you could  even nominate a submap
to monitor. My phlog's gopher space is set up in such a way that the gophermap
file just pulls together a handful of  submaps; one for the fancy  header  and
description, one for the list of  phlogs and one for the "back to" link, so if
it  could be  worked  that a  change  would only register  if the  phlogs list
gophermap  was  updated  then  it'd  avoid,  at least  in  my case,  my  phlog
registering as being updated when all  I'm doing is  fiddling with the layout.
I've got no idea about the logistics of that, just thinking out loud.

   Anyway,  to  conclude;  I   agree   that  it's  a  real  bummer   that  the
phlogosphere/gopher.club list is a mess right now but  you really can't be mad
when, as a result so many interesting things are going on.


[1] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/ulcer/toplist
[2] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/auzymoto/
[3] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/slugmax/cgi-bin/recently_updated_gophers.cgi
[4] gopher://alexschroeder.ch/02018-02-05_Moku_Pona
[5] gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20180206-ideas-for-an-aggregator



EOF