2022-07-17

phew been awhile since I've posted to gopher. I spoke 
last time about wanting to bring more content into the
gopher space from the regular web to take advantage
of the bandwidth savings that gopher provides.

Even low bandwidth HTML websites utilize more bandwidth
than the gopher protocol which is a great property to 
have when your internet connection is essentially a 4g
tethered iphone. 

I've explored the project guternburg gopher website and
I have to say that the experience is useable but not 
super great on gopher. Searching for good books is tough
since you end up having to download large index files 
and then navigate many levels deep into the directory 
structure of the website. 

Additionally, the plain text format of the books is 
useable but doesnt honestly lend itself to long term
gopher reading. One of the ideas I've been kicking around
is to host a few curated novels on my gopher site and actually
split the novels into chapters which each novel having its
own gophermap. This would make it pretty nice to consume
the novels a chapter at a time. 

I'm not sure if anyone has done this yet but at least
I'll do it for myself for some of the authors I like that
aren't on the top 100 list on project gutenburg. 

we'll see how far I get on that project