#UNDERSIDE

Playing around with govidious, I grew comfortable enough to make something
more useful. This gopher hole now hosts lists of various privacy
respecting foss front-ends in _ /files/underside/ _[1], sourced from
the fantastic farside[2] project. 

Instances for each service are divided up into individual txt files in 
the said directory. While you're welcome to manually visit everytime
you're looking for a front end, the idea behind creating this was to 
have an updated list that is easily accesible and can be incorporated
into custom scripts.

For example, to get a random instance for gothub, a github front-end, try
the following:

 $ echo "/files/underside/gothub.txt" | nc triapul.cz 70 | sort -R | head -n1

A simple parser for replacing github links could look a little something like
this (let's imagine it's called parser.sh):


```
#!/bin/sh
instance=`echo "/files/underside/gothub.txt" |\
          nc triapul.cz 70 | sort -R | head -n1 |\
          cut -d"/" -f3`

parse() {
 echo "$1" | sed "s/github.com/$2/"
}

parse $1 $instance
```


Now if we run:

 $ sh parser.sh https://github.com/benbusby/farside

We get back a front-ended url. It's up to you how/if you make use of this.


_technicalities:

The lists are refreshed once a day. It is entirely possible for a project
to go dark and exist for a while with no known instance. In that case the
file will contain "NOTHING" instead.

I think of farside as a successor to the once shining simple-web[3]
project and I wanted to make sure its legacy is felt even in
the gopherspace.

May this project help you navigate the web-world.


_resources:

[1]gopher://triapul.cz/1/files/underside
[2]https://farside.link
[2]https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/#about
[2]https://github.com/benbusby/farside
[3]gopher://triapul.cz/0/phlog/2023-06-04-simple-web-memorial-service.txt