Tagged gophers
--------------

This idea has been bouncing around in my head for months now, I've
just finally gotten around to typing it out.

I've noticed that dokuja (whose gopherhole has a floppy drive
simulator[1], did you know?) very often includes tags in his phlog[2].
I don't *think* I've seen anybody else do this, but I could be wrong.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to "use" dokuja's tags, in the
sense of being able to see all phlog posts with a given that, they're
just...there.

The format is very simple, each phlog post just has a line like the
following near the end:

Tags: #bbs #telnet #gophers

It would be *very* easy to detect something like that
programmatically.  Go through a phlog post line by line, if a line
begins with "tag" (case insensitive, and just those three letters, to
support e.g. "tags:", "tagged:", "tagged as:") and contains at least
one non-initial word beginning with # then it is considered a tagline
and all words beginning with # are considered tags.

It would not be too hard to write a script which monitored, say,
Bongusta[3] and Tomasino's exhaustive phlog roll[4], and scanned all
new entries once every 24 hours for tags, keeping results in a
database.  A gopher front-end to that database could let you see *all*
phlogs, from anywhere in the phlogosphere, taged #bbs or whatever.  I
think this would be a good way to search for content in gopherspace,
assuming people started using it, which would be far less effort than
Google-style full text search, but also far more effective than
Veronica[5]'s selector-only search.

Between VF-1, circumlunar.space and my retrogrouch Mastodon client
(not "launched" yet, but usable for the basics, email me if you're
really interested), I need another project like I need a hole in the
head, but if you've been looking for some interesting way to serve
gopherspace, you're very welcome to this idea.  I would definitely
begin tagging my posts if I knew somebody was working on this.

Tags: #tags #gopher #search

[1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/~dokuja/fds
[2] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/~dokuja/phlog
[3] gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/en/bongusta
[4] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/moku-pona/
[5] gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/v2