--- Magical Change Log --- 2024-02-03 Moved to a different physical location. Back after a 24 hour period of down time. 2023-05-04 Fixed US economic indicators and US unemployment by state feed. Had to change the user agent in requests library because the websites we scrape started blocking us. 2022-12-01 Added South Dakota Searchlight to news feeds. Closing in on my goal to host 50 news feeds. Added RSS, ATOM feeds for livechat. Experimenting with TWTXT feed for livechat. Made some changes to livechat that could allow expansion to a full fledge message board, should that be desirable at some point, for example if one of the other boards goes offline suddenly. 2022-11-26 Fixed SearX search. Pruned some link rot. Added some new links suggested by you guys. 2022-11-09 Added Tennessee Lookout, New Orleans Veritas and some other news feeds. 2022-09-21 Added Eurasianet to news feeds. 2022-07-21 Today I worked on Magical.Gopher. I renewed magical.gopher domain at reg.gopher. Fixed some broken links, and updated news feeds. .Gopher domains are free, compliments of opennic.org. Get one for your own gopher site. They're fun. You can reach Magical Gopher by using opennic dns servers. They also have lots of other unusual domain names, most free. Magical.gopher resolves to port 70, but if you want the full magical.gopher experience, follow the selector at the top of the page to get to port 71. Or just go directly to gopher://magical.gopher:71 2022-07-09 Added Meduza news feed. This is independent Russian media in exile who have decided to make their war reporting content available through creative commons licensing for the duration of the war on Ukraine. Also updated the Magical Onion site, fixed some broken links and added more links to local content. I purposely try not to link to non-onion sites. Looking for more gopher onion sites. Hit me up if I'm missing any. 2022-06-28 Added more news feeds from WHO, NATO, Daily Kos, Missouri Independent. Working to standardize code beween gopher, Tor and .gopher dns sites so secondary sites can be updated more often. DropSafe blog is acting up. May have to disable. 2022-06-24 Added news feed from Colorado Newsline 2022-06-24 Added news feeds from shareAmerica.gov and PublicIntegrity.org. 2022-06-12 Fixed Ham Call sign address lookup service. 2022-05-19 Gopher Live Chat is back. 2022-05-18 Still here! Added a Journalist's Resource and Freedom House news feeds. Fixed a couple of bugs. 2022-03-03 I'm taking down the Live Chat, temporarily. Someone filled it up with garbage, so need to implement some counter measures to discourage that. Meanwhile, taking it down so I don't have to think about it. Thanks to all who participated with friendly and fun converstations there. Best not to be naiive about idiots on gopher. 2022-02-15 Re-evaluating some of the news feeds that are not feeding us useful content reliably. Fixed Texas Tribune. Halting RT for now because there is too much content and no obvious way to sort it by language. Halting US Energy feed because its boring. Fixed the "previous month" selector. To do: update feeds on onion and .gopher sites. Rewrite the entire feed monster so it runs more efficiently and uses less bandwidth. 2022-01-04 Added Daily Montanan to news feeds, from state of Montana, where weed was just legalized. Fixed fnews feed. 2021-12-01 Fixed a few problems with news feeds. George Recorder now works. The python stuff I use to grab these feeds is not very reliable. Its supposed to 'remember' articles its downloaded but it often doesn't. It fails at language detection. I'll do what I can until I can something better to use. It seems each feed requires manual tweaking. If you notice something is broken, post it to me in the 'Live Chat.' I check in there every day or so. 2021-11-04 Added a section for Ham Radio, and also added DropSafe blog to News. Expanded the Gopher Live Chat to 100 lines. Can do more later. Just want to put a practical limit on it. Checked .onion site, and glad to find its stable and working. 2021-08-19 The 'Gopher Live Chat' (GLC) experiment went online today. Check it out and give any feedback. The idea is to provide a semi-moderated place where you can try to find others to chat with 'live.' Because it can be so 'hit or miss' on gopher, I suggest going to GLC at the top of 'odd' hours (odd because this experiment is odd). Knowing that is the standard 'meet up' opportunity, maybe you'll find someone. Maybe not. Give it a shot. Is this ripe for abuse? Of course. I will check it a couple of times a day and remove anything thats too nuts or spammy. If it gets too bad I'll take it down, but lets try and see what happens first. 2021-08-18 Magical.Fish is hitting the practical limits for finding and processing all the news feeds we have added. The 'Newspaper3k' library fails to recognize languages, apparently is not supported any more, and has other problems. I will keep it running anyway for now, but might have to start planning a move to a bigger computer. We're pushing the little Raspi to its limits. It's running 3 gopher sites, processing a dozen news feeds, and running tor and webservers. Some of the services are little more intense than others. I wanted to add live search to the site, but I think that is going to have to wait a bit. 2021-08-01 Thinking of ways to provide a 'live chat' service over gopher protocol, because I like to build things nobody will ever use, for some reason. Also working on site search. 2021-07-31 Fixed Covid Deaths by country. 2021-07-30 Added GlobalVoices.org and Plosone.org Scientific Journal to News Feeds. 2021-07-24 Added Texas Tribunes to News Feeds. Added menus that work on magical.gopher and magical fish tor/onion service. Streamlined some code. Still looking for an exchange rate api. Searx search seems to be broken again. Investigating. 2021-07-08 Added F-News Magazine, a Chicago news source. Fixed Magical.Gopher opennic DNS so it works again, and also added news feeds to it, with selectors that work. Restricted RT news feed to sports. There was just too much junk to process and I was having problems parsing different language feeds. Will revisit later. 2021-07-07 Added news feeds from Poynter.org, U.S. Dept of Defence and U.S. Dept. of Energy. Fixes some broken news feeds. 2021-06-03 ratesapi.io is now exchangeratesapi.io, and they broke our currency exchange service. Their new service is very limited, so I am looking for a new exchange rate provider. It will be down for a little while. 2021-05-19 Restored the Onion gopher site. 2021-04-07 Added news from Minnesota Reformer. Why not a little homegrown news? 2021-03-24 Started a phlog here. Added news feeds from The Conversation, and Cuba TV. 2021-03-16 Added news feeds from BoingBoing and Pro Publica. 2021-03-15 Added a news feed from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Some of their content is pretty good, and the license is a fit. More news content for Gopherspace! 2021-02-14 Made a hangman game. Its in the "Fun" section. 2021-01-26 Removed some dead selectors. Does anyone know of any selectors for sports news? 2020-10-04 The onion site is back. The new Tor address is: magicalxot2nosefso27zfzuujuaphtznzn3ng7q44u426s6bkiuvzqd.onion We have abanonded our old V2 onion address for this longer and more secure V3 address, primarily because Tor Project has deprecated the shorter V2 addresses and will discontinue support soon. 2020-07-21 Added ranking of U.S. states by unemployment rates to money section. 2020-06-15 Added full opennic.org dns access for Magical.Gopher over port 71. 2020-06-14 Major site restructuring. Finally isolated this hole in a python venv. I continue to grow and learn from my mistakes. 2020-06-07 Added file browsing. Updated to Flask-Gopher 2.2.1. Restructured folders and files. Removed dead links. The sports section is looking mighty thin... 2020-06-01 Power outtage knocked the Raspi4 offline, and seems to have damaged it. Reverted back to 3b+. 2020-05-26 Fixed Searx search. Searx instances do not live forever, I guess. 2020-05-20 Added U.S. major economic indicators from Bureau of Labor Stats to the Money section. This should be interesting to watch over the next months. 2020-05-18 Added limit on feedback size, rearranged main menu to reduce clutter, some behind the scenes code fixes. 2020-05-06 Added prices for precious metals, gold, silver, paladium, platinum. 2020-05-05 Added current U.S. mortgage rates to MONEy section. See national and local rates. 2020-05-03 Magical.Gopher is now resolving here! This requires using OpenNIC.org name servers (try 172.98.193.42). 2020-04-16 Fixed a problem that brought down the TOR site. Updated some selectors. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever used the onion site but me (sigh). 2o2o-04-02 Added current stats about Corona Virus deaths to news section. Repaired the 'Whats my IP address' feature. Pruned some dead TOR links. 2020-03-23 OMFG. We were down for 24 hours because I majorly screwed up while trying to make things better. It was a humbling experience. I won't go into details, because they suck. Sometimes I don't know why I try. 2020-03-20 Updated the TOR service to include all local services provided on Magical.fish. 2020-03-19 Ug. I knew this would happen. Stockquotes went down today because provider fixed a typo in his api. Excange: became Exchange: and broke my sloppy code. Fixed. 2020-03-11 Added some additional data to stock quote results. 2020-03-10 Stock quotes api stopped, so I substituted a different provider. Looks like it will workout for the best. 2020-03-08 Added currency rates. Type a currency symbol ('CAD') and get back about 30 results. 2020-03-02 Experimenting with adding Searx search 2020-01-12 Fixed an error with stock quotes and ended up re-writing the whole thing. 2020-01-07 Added some English to ? language translators. 2019-12-15 I'll try to keep a log of some of the changes I've done here. First notable change is added a change log.