The Lightsabre Project
======================

Part 005 - Progress


Real life has somewhat taken over recently, so progress has been slow
to non-existent over the past few weeks I'm afraid. However, a 4-day
weekend means I've been able to set aside (a little) time to work on
my lightsabre.

I'd got as far as implementing basic connectivity, document retrieval
and selector navigation (forward only), but had two or three bugs to
squash where I either wasn't clearing data areas (junk in the output)
or was miscounting lengths etc. (eg. selector got truncated).  Those
seem to be resolved for the time being, so here's a sample from a
current session ('READY' is the TSO prompt, apologies for wrapped
lines):

 READY                                                                          
call 'lee.gopher.load(gopher)'                                                  
 gopher for mvs                                                                 
                                                                                
          8     8"""" 8"""" 8""""8     8""""8 8"""88 8""""8 8   8 8"""" 8"""8   
          8     8     8     8    8     8    " 8    8 8    8 8   8 8     8   8   
          8e    8eeee 8eeee 8eeee8ee   8e     8    8 8eeee8 8eee8 8eeee 8eee8e  
          88    88    88    88     8   88  ee 8    8 88     88  8 88    88   8  
          88    88    88    88     8   88   8 8    8 88     88  8 88    88   8  
          88eee 88eee 88eee 88eeeee8   88eee8 8eeee8 88     88  8 88eee 88   8  
                                                                                
                                                                                
 001 FILE About                                                                 
                                                                                
          Rambling diatribes                                                    
 002 DIR  Phlog                                                                 
                                                                                
          MVS, OS/390, z/OS, VM/370, VM/SP, VM/ESA, z/VM...                     
 003 DIR  Mainframe                                                             
                                                                                
          Taking pictures                                                       
 004 DIR  Photo                                                                 
                                                                                
 Please enter command (h for help)                                              
h                                                                               
 ======================                                                         
 Gopher for MVS -- Help                                                         
 ======================                                                         
                                                                                
 Keys:                                                                          
                                                                                
 R     - Redisplay current page                                                 
 G nnn - Goto selector nnn                                                      
 U url - Goto URL url                                                           
 H     - Display this help                                                      
 Q     - Quit gopher                                                            
                                                                                
 Please enter command (h for help)                                              
g 2                                                                             
                                                                                
          8""""8                                                                
          8    8 e   e e     eeeee eeeee                                        
          8eeee8 8   8 8     8  88 8   8                                        
          88     8eee8 8e    8   8 8e                                           
          88     88  8 88    8   8 88 "8                                        
          88     88  8 88eee 8eee8 88ee8                                        
                                                                                
                                                                                
 001 DIR  Lightsabre Project                                                    
                                                                                
 002 FILE 2019-02-15 Friday Morning at Work                                     
 003 FILE 2019-02-05 Recent Reads                                               
 004 FILE 2019-02-01 Availability                                               
 005 FILE 2019-01-23 Gopher and the Jedi                                        
 006 FILE 2019-01-18 Visiblink, Sloum, Spring                                   
 007 FILE 2019-01-17 Reading                                                    
 008 FILE 2019-01-12 Long Weekend                                               
 009 FILE 2019-01-09 Giving Up                                                  
 010 FILE 2019-01-08 Sundogs and Pubnix                                         
                                                                                
 Please enter command (h for help)                                              
g 9                                                                             
          It might seem a bit premature, but I'm thinking of abandoning my      
          project to run my own web site:1:. Feel free to have a look - there's 
          no real content on there yet though.                                  
                                                                                
          I spent some time setting the thing up and getting it to look how I   
          wanted, but having done that I'm kind of fed up with the whole        
          thing. It doesn't help that there's some crossover with my current    
          job, and the very last thing I want to do when I get home from work is
          do more of the same, only not get paid for it - amirite?              
                                                                                
          So, here I am, 2 phlogs in, and thinking of ditching it all to use    
          gopher instead. It just seems so much easier, and I was determined to 
          keep the site to just HTML and CSS, so it's not like I'd be losing    
          much by serving it over plain text anyway. And I'm fairly sure that   
          any images I'd include would just be terminal session screenshots or  
          some diagrams - which would be easy enough to show on a plain-text    
          page anyway.                                                          
                                                                                
          I think I might have talked myself into it.                           
                                                                                
          :1: https://www.tanmatsu.jp                                           
 Please enter command (h for help)                                              
q     
 done!
 READY

As you can see, the interface is extremely rudimentary :-)
Next thing on the list is to implement a history stack. Only going
forwards is somewhat limiting...