Quick gophery thoughts ---------------------- Lots of exciting stuff is happening in the phlogosphere right now and I'm really bummed that I just don't have the time to participate in it all as fully as I'd like. We are slowly moving from the short term rental place that we used as a base when we arrived in Finland into a place we're renting long term, and it's eating up a lot of my time, especially as we've ended up repainting the bedroom. But nobody wants to hear about that... Popping some thoughts from the stack: A couple of new phlogs have shown up here at SDF. Welcome, newbies, and Godspeed! A really neat phlog aggregator, very similar to something I was thinking of writing myself (see my recent bboard/GOPHER post) has appeared, by the name Bongusta has appeared - see gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta/. This is great! Thanks to the author for writing it, for serving it publically, for letting me know it exists, and for including my phlog in the list. Thanks to Bongusta, I am discovering that there really is a vibrant phlogosphere beyond SDF and even Grex! Furthermore, folk out there are talking about the same stuff we are - better mechanisms for commenting on phlogs, etc. I feel like the phlogosphere is on the cusp of self-organising itself into something healthier than it has been in a long time. This is exciting! Tying very briefly into my recent thoughts on walled gardens yet again, I think an important criteria by which walled gardens should be judged is the extent to which they insist, assume or suggest that they *should* be the entirety of a person's online experience, as opposed to one star in a wide constellation. SDF is perhaps a little guilty here. in that by having 'gopher' and 'linx' both default to SDF homepages it's very easy to fall into the trap of not really looking outside the fortress. Perhaps this is a bit harsh, it's not like until recently there was anything like Bongusta they could link to instead. Still, part of me feels a little naive for how much of a "revelation" it's seemed like to find frequently updated phlogs elsewhere in the net. This is, of course, exactly how it should be. Phlogger "Ze Libertine Gamer" has written about modernising gopher by standardising on some extensions to provide, e.g. crypotgraphic security. This is something I have been interested in a long time, but it's not exactly a new idea and has been hashed out many times on the gopher-project mailing list in the years I've been subscribed to it, and nothing ever seems to take off. As reluctant as I am to admit it, I often wonder if the answer to the woes of the modern web is not to revitalise gopher, but rather to try to reclaim a small chunk of the web. I have no real beef with HTTP. There is nothing to stop us writing a browser which implements either an old version of HTML or implements only a subset of HTML5, leaving out the worst things. With no Javascript, no plugins, no cookies, etc. it's not that bad. Heck, such browsers exist now, they just suck for browsing the "real web" because most websites are badly broken. But just as easily as we can all build gopherholes, we could build websites which render beautifully in these sites. Then we'd get TLS security, and multi-tabbed graphical browers with inbuilt bookmarking, etc. Instead of proudly putting "Valid HTML 4" buttons on our sites, we could write our own validator and proudly put "Valid Not Awful" buttons on our sites. Validation criteria could include: * not setting any cookies * sticking to a subset of HTML elements (e.g. no