Gopher Power
============

*Last Update: 2020-04-27*

It's no secret that I think Gopher is a wonderful protocol. What
I find most intriguing though is that it feels like most people
who use Gopher under utillize it. It's true that Gopher is
extremely basic, and that's what we love about it! But there are
still some features that can be combined in exciting new ways.

The Gopher feature I see **most** under-utiliized is the gopher
directory/menu. If you're using the gophernicus server, you can
create your custom directory by adding a gophermap file to your
folder. But just what is so under-utilized about the directory?
Most people just let the gopher server produce a directory
listing. This is woeful! The directory listing has so much more
power! The power in the directory type comes with a single letter
'i'. 

The Gopher protocol specifies that 'i' is an
informational line which mean that you can put whatever you want
on it. The letter 'i' means *you can put whatever you want on
that line!* Do you realize how awesome that is? That means that
you can put text above, between, and beneath any links that you
have to other locations on your gopher hole, or to external
links. Sweet sassy!

If you're using the popular gophernicus server, you place a file
called gophermap in any directory and that will be rendered
instead of the normal directory listing. In this gophermap file,
the i is implied unless you have a tab character in the line. I
found this out when I was trying to use a `===` heading bar.
Gophernicus treats `=` as an include statement, so it was trying
to include `==` (or more) as a filename. Of course that didn't
make any sort of sense. But if I stuck `i` at the beginning then
it just turned it into `i===`. What to do? Well, I realized that
all the line needed was a tab character! So `i===\t` worked
*perfectly*. The tab chcaracter fools gophernicus into requiring
the leading i.

Anyway, within the directory listing you can put text, but you
can also link to other resources within your own gopher hole or a
gopher hole anywhere else on the Internet. Not only can you link
directly to files, you can also link to directory types. Or
images. Or audio files. So you may not be able to produce content that's as
free-form as you might with HTML, you can organize your thoughts
and your content in arbitrary graphs. For instance, if you
look at [my homepage][waynewerner.com], you will see that I have
my main page, and from there I link to several sub-pages. Most of
those link back to the home page. 

In Gopher you can do the same thing by using gophermap files (or
the equivalent) but what's amazing about Gopher is that you can
tell it that your flat file is a directory, and the client will
believe it, and render your file like a directory. Text + links.
Does that sound like anything you've used before? Just tell
gopher that your file should be treated as a directory, and bam!
It will be. Consider a simple webpage that has a home, a list of
projects, a CV, and a blog. You could create it like so:

    ~/public_gopher/
    |-- cv.map
    |-- gophermap
    |-- home.map
    |-- projects
    |   |-- gallery
    |   |   `-- gophersnake
    |   |       |-- 01.jpg
    |   |       |-- 02.jpg
    |   |       `-- 03.jpg
    |   `-- gophersnake.md
    `-- projects.map

3 directories, 8 files

This is pretty basic, right? But you could totally present the
same kind of information with this structure that you would have
in a typical website. Your gophermap would be your "home" page.
The other .map files are just files - nothing special about the
extension, they could just be regular files. Or have other
extensions. All that's important is that your gophermap could
look like this (for gophernicus. `\t` means a real tab):

    My Homepage!
    i============\t
    
    1My CV!	/cv.map	gopher.example.com	70
        Looking for a Gopher expert? Hire me!
    1Sweet Projects	/projects.map	gopher.example.com	70
        Okay, projects is technically overkill, as I only have
        the one. But hey, I'll add more soon!

Then your projects.map could look like this:

    My Sweet Sweet Projects
    i=======================\t

    1Gophersnake	/projects/gophersnake.map	gopher.example.com	70
        Gophersnake is my basic Gopher Server. It was shockingly
        simple to write!

And your Gophersnake map could look something like this:

    Gophersnake
    i===========\t

    This is how I made gophersnake. First I went and found some
    sort of thing like this:

    Ithe thing I found	/projects/gallery/gophersnake/01.jpg	gopher.example.com	70

    This is some information that I have aabout that first image,
    blah blah blah.

    IMy next image	/projects/gallery/gophersnake/02.jpg	gopher.example.com	70

    This is more information about that other image.

    IFor my final trick	/projects/gallery/gophersnake/03.jpg	gopher.example.com	70

    And finally I'm done here! For further reading check out
    someone else's site:

    1Their Gopherhole	/	another.example.com	70

You can organize and present your content just swimmingly.
Another approach, rather than using map files is that you could
just use a CommonMark/Markdown file and give it 0 for text file.
Since CommonMark is basically plain text anyway, the worst case
is that they get readable text that they enjoy. You would provide
links to your image like 

    ![For my final trick](gopher://gopher.example.com/I/projects/gallery/gophersnake/03.jpg)

(or use the `![For my final trick][01.jpg]` style) and your
reader would be able to understand your post. But if they have a
smart enough client, it would be able to render the CommonMark as
HTML, and since it would know how to speak Gopher, it could
actually render the images inline.

Gopher gives you more power than you realize.

For my next trick, I'll show you how to combine Gopher and
Atom/RSS, because doesn't your phlog deserve it?

-W


[waynewerner.com]: https://www.waynewerner.com