About Magical.Gopher

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When I started Magical.fish, I hoped someday it could be called Magical.gopher.

Well, that day is now.

I didn't know at the time about OpenNIC.org. OpenNIC is an alternative unofficial domain registry that has been around for 20+ years. And as luck would have it, .GOPHER is one of their domains.

The only problem is that you can't just type "magical.gopher" into any gopher browser or web proxy. Because .GOPHER is not part of ICANN, it won't resolve unless you use OpenNIC DNS servers.

OpenNIC DNS servers will not only resolve the OpenNIC domains, but everything else on the web as well.  You can get a list of OpenNIC DNS servers and learn more at https://www.opennic.org/

Did I mention that it is 100% free to register a .GOPHER domain?  I think that's pretty cool.

So to register a .GOPHER domain, configure your DNS to use OpenNIC DNS servers.
To make things easy, I just changed my DNS setting on my router to an OpenNIC server.

Next, I went to http://REG.GOPHER to configure an account and login.

Registering the Magical.Gopher domain was very easy.

I have long used DnsMadeEasy.com to manage my DNS.  They don't care what domain name you use, so I configured MagicalGopher with my ip address. 

I like that DnsMadeEasy supports DynamicDNS, which is what I have here.  I wrote a python script to check every 10 minutes whether my Ip address has changed, and if it has, then to tell DnsMadeEasy. If you have a static ip address, then no worries.

It would be fun to have a .GOPHER eco-system.  If the web proxy providers would use OpenNIC DNS servers, it would be super easy for anyone to access .GOPHER sites.

As a hacker, of course I love stuff like this.