The Step-by-Step Guide to setting up a Gopher Hole and Phlog at circumlunar.space Note: this guide assumes that you have Linux installed and are familiar with a few basic Linux/UNIX concepts and commands. When the guide instructs you to type a command, do not include the quotation marks. The steps: 1. Request your gopherspace. Follow the instructions on the 'Request Asylum' page. Don't request space unless you're actually going to use it, since disk space is limited. 2. When your request is granted you'll receive an email from solderpunk and you'll see your username on the main page. 3. You're going to access your account using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). a. Open a terminal and type 'sftp -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa username@circumlunar.space' (remember to replace 'username' - and 'id_rsa', if necessary - with your details and remember not to type the quotation marks!). Note: there's a single space between '~/.ssh/id_rsa' and 'username@circumlunar.space'. You should then see: sftp> 4. Type 'ls' to list the files. You should see two things: a gopher directory and a plain text file called orientation. If you type 'get orientation' sftp will download the orientation file, which you can then open and read on your computer. 5. Many regular Linux commands work in the sftp shell. There are also some unique commands. The most important to you will be the following: ls list the files in a directory cd change directory put send a file from your computer to your gopher space at circumlunar.space get download a file from your gopher space at circumlunar.space to your computer mkdir make a directory rm delete a file rmdir delete a directory chmod change the permissions on a file You can find a full list of the available commands by typing 'man sftp' in a terminal. The list is under the heading 'INTERACTIVE COMMANDS' near the end of the man page. 6. The first thing that you're going to do is set up a directory for your phlog entries. a. Type 'cd gopher' to move into the gopher directory. This is the directory that contains the files that visitors to your gopher hole see. b. Type 'mkdir phlog' to make a directory for your phlog entries. c. Type 'chmod 705 phlog' to make your phlog directory readable by everyone. This is a necessary step. If you don't change the permissions on the directory, visitors won't be able to see it. 7. Now you're going to create a welcome page for your gopher hole and add your phlog directory to it. The welcome page is called a 'gophermap'. a. Since you only have FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to your gopher space, you will have to create the file on your local computer, using a text editor, and then transfer it to your gopher hole. b. Create a folder on your computer for your gopher files. Call it gopher. c. Using your text editor, create a file like the one between the dashed lines. Do not include the dashed lines themselves. The space between the words '1Phlog' and 'phlog' is a tab. It has to be a tab space or it will not function correctly. ------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to So-and-so's Gopher hole! 1Phlog phlog ------------------------------------------------------------- d. Save the page with the name gophermap in your gopher folder. e. The first line will display as plain text. Alter it as you like. The second line will create a link to your phlog directory. The second line works as follows: the 1 is the file type, which in this case is a directory; "Phlog" is the link that will be displayed to the user when they view the page; the second "phlog" is the directory that will be opened when the user 'clicks' the link. You can find more information on creating gophermaps at the following places: gopher://167.88.113.62/0/docs/README.Gophermap gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20181102.txt gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/dbucklin/posts/how_gopher.txt Side note: all of the guides that I have seen say to put an i at the beginning of each empty and plain text line in a gophermap. I think that the i's are supposed to be invisible, but the first time I created a gophermap, I included them and they displayed in the browser. So I took them out. As long as a line contains no tabs (or reserved characters like parentheses), it will be displayed as plain text. f. Upload the gophermap file to your gopherspace by returning to sftp in the terminal. You should still be in the gopher directory. You can check by typing 'pwd'. Navigate to the gopher directory if necessary. g. To upload the gophermap, type "put -p /home/user/gopher/gophermap gophermap" where user is your username on your local Linux machine. Note that there's a single space between -p and /home... h. Start your gopher browser (I'm going to assume that you'll leave your sftp terminal open and start the browser in a separate terminal if you're using Lynx or another terminal-based browser) and navigate to your gopherspace. You should see your new gophermap displayed. If you don't see it, the problem is probably with the permissions. In that case, return to the sftp terminal window and type 'chmod 704 gophermap' which should resolve the problem. 8. Create your first phlog entry. a. This is really easy. Write a phlog entry in a text file. b. Save the text file in the gopher folder on your local machine. I'm going to assume that you've named your file 'foo'. Side note: once you get phlogging, you'll probably want to use some kind of systematic naming convention so that your blog entries sort properly. Alternatively, you could create a gophermap in your phlog folder that lists your phlog entries in order, but if you do so, you'll have to update the gophermap manually every time you upload a new phlog entry. See the note on gophermaps below for more information. c. I'm going to assume that the sftp terminal is still open and that you are still in the gopher directory (If you've logged out of sftp, log back in using the command from step 3. Type 'cd gopher' to navigate into the gopher directory.) d. To upload your entry type 'put -p /home/user/gopher/foo phlog/foo'. Again, that's a single space between -p and /home... e. If you cannot see your entry from the browser, you may have to change the permissions. In the sftp terminal, navigate to the phlog directory (type 'cd phlog' if you've still got the sftp terminal open ... otherwise if you've just logged in again and you're in the root directory, the command would be 'cd gopher/phlog') and type 'chmod 704 foo' to fix the permissions. That's it! You're phlogging! A note on user etiquette: Throughout the guide, I worked under the assumption that you remained logged into circumlunar.space via sftp. I did that for the sake of simplicity. Now that you know what you're doing, log out whenever you're not actively transferring files or creating directories. A note on gophermaps: As you've probably guessed, a gophermap is simply an index page. If there is no gophermap in a directory, your browser will automatically display the list of files in that directory. If there is a gophermap in the directory, the browser will display it instead. As a result, you can choose whether to have directories display their contents as a file list or use a gophermap to display the directory's contents in a customized manner. The gophermap gives you control over what the user sees as they navigate, which means that you can use it to conceal some of the contents of a directory (depending on the links you put into the gophermap), to list the files in an alternative order or hierarchy, and even to include hyperlinks, gopherlinks to other gopherholes, etc.