I and some others have noticed some issues recently with the SDF
phlogosphere display [0] and the sort order. So you know the
history, way back in 2009, smj posted this to the GOPHER bboard:

    TACKER:  smj (Stephen Jones)
    SUBJECT: .. phlogosphere.org
    DATE:    10-Dec-09 18:09:57
    HOST:    ol

    The date information in the phlog listing is taken from
    ~ftp/pub/users/$LOGNAME directory.  You can touch your directory
    as part of your script if you want to show that you've updated
    your phlog.

That worked for a bit, but broke at some point and led to the
workaround of typing 'phlog' twice in order to get your phlog at the
top of the list. The 'touch' method is back, but the order of the
entries on the phlogosphere page is in a seemingly random order
now. I'm sure it will be fixed soon, however I noticed that perhaps
the mtime of the user's gopher (and possibly ftp) directory is not
the best way to track recently updated phlogs. I think Logout's
bongusta [1] does this best, but at the expense of having to
manually add phlogs to the list of those being monitored.

Anyway, I was trying to come up with a decent middle ground. Most
phloggers have a root gophermap - I can't think of any off the top
of my head that just plunk files in their root directory (some
phlogs do this, but not in the gopher root directory). So what if we
track the most recently updated root gophermaps? As a
proof-of-concept, you can go to [2] and try it out. That will show
you 40 SDF gopher holes with the most recently updated gophermaps,
by mtime. Let me know what you think.

[0] gopher://gopher.club/phlogs
[1] gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta/
[2] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/slugmax/cgi-bin/recently_updated_gophers.cgi