Captains Phlog                                               2020.01.24
_______________________________________________________________________
                                    
/*   Housekeeping...
 *   Welcome to Two New Gophers:
 *   As of 17 Jan, Floodgap's "New Gopher Servers Since" 1999 has added
 *      Blizzard of Zeros	gopher://blizzardofzeros.com/1
 *      Colin Cogle's Site	gopher://colincogle.name/1
 */

             A Gopher by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet.
                                  or
                      How the Cow Got Its Overbite.
                            a Just So Story


A little over a year ago I treated myself. I dont typically spend much
on unnecessary stuff but I bought a domain. I had been practicing my
Linux and SSH skills on my Raspberry Pi Zero W for a couple of months
and I decided I wanted to host not just a web page but a full Tilde
Community. I chose TilceCow liking the rhyming with "Till The Cow..."
and whatever puns would ensue from that. The fact that it was hosted on
a Raspberry Pi also gave me "Cow Pi" as a bonus!

I struggled to keep the system working for my handful of users (who
never seemed to get together on stuff like I had seen with other
communities). I also learned QUICKLY and PAINFULLY about malicious
threats. After maybe six months, something happened. Im not sure what
really but the system just... stopped one day. That was it. I wasn't
having any of the fun I envisioned so I decided to leave well enough
alone.

For the next few months I just used the domain for publishing my own
content to the web while all the while spending more and more time in
love with the early web aesthetic and surfing with Lynx over SSH from
my WinBox. By November 2019, I got braver and decided to try something
New - Gopher. It was new to me anyway. TildeCow was now running on an
old Acer Aspire One with a static WWW page served via $ socat and
Gopher requests handled by Gophernicus ne Pygopherd.

I have this thing where I go whole-hog on some indoor project over the
winter months so as to avoid noticing how long, cold, and dark they
are. This year its mastering Gopher, Honing my Bash Scripting Skills,
and Learning ANSI-C. When spring comes, you'll see a definite lull in
content with, I imagine, a resurgence again this coming fall.

That my children is the story of how the Cow got its Overbite.