Welcome to our gopher server. This site is hosted in Minnesota, the birthplace of gopher, and by a University of Minnesota graduate, no less!

Magical.Fish is not a nostalgic gopher hole. It is a full featured, modern gopher server running on Nginx. It is developed in Python using Flask-Gopher.

Our goal is to provide you with a fast, low surveillance way to connect with interesting and current text-based information in an interactive way.

Magical.Fish content formatting favors modern gopher clients and mobile users. For readability, we generally allow your gopher client to wrap text, rather than forcing breaks that result in jagged text and reduce readability and overall joy. When you use Magical.fish, we want you to discover the fun and usefulness of gopher.


How we got here
===============

Magical.fish began in 2018 as my personal gopherspace start page.

After spending months reading phlogs and digging through gopherspace, I was motivated to build a gopher hole of my own to organize all of the great content I discovered. I also wanted to learn about setting up a Tor onion service.

But magical.fish is not just a bunch of selectors (links). And it is not simply a mirror of a web blog.  There are now real time and interactive services here that I could not find elsewhere in gopher space. To help my coding skills, I hope to continue adding more services in the near future. 

Gopher has become useful to me as a way of accessing all kinds of information. I use it every day, not out of nostalgia or pity, but because it is a useful, non-invasive way of consuming information.

From the active selectors/links you find on Magical Fish, you will be able to access local weather,  get real time stock quotes, find answers on Wikipedia, read news feeds for major news organizations, look up movie show times for theaters near you, read 'phlogs' from interesting people, and more.  There's plenty to do today in gopherspace, so make gopher part of your routine.  What I hope magical fish contributes to your life is an organized way to discover and access gopher content, while also adding a few new services.


How we got our name
===================
I wish I had a better story about why this site is called Magical.fish and not something more gopherish.  It happened to be a domain I already had registered for a few years for a different project, which didn't pan out.  I also think its memorable and lighthearted.  So for now, it's magical fish. Maybe someday it can be magical.gopher.


If you like this hole, please tell others about it. I intend to leave it up indefinitely.