Gopher I've had a lot of fun exploring the gopherspace. The protocol is simple, and as someone with a working knowledge of http, I'd argue that it is a bit too simple in some cases, for example, it is the client who must know the type of resource being accessed so that it can show it correctly, so entering a resource requires you to know its type. I think this is rather unelegant. However, this is a small shortcoming that I can easily live with. What makes gopher special compared to http, is not the protocol as much as its users. In the world-wide-web, users seem to be strongly divided into two groups; those who provide the services and those who consume them. This is bad, it is not much different from the other syndicated media, except that on the www, the user are even creating much of the content, for the services to use as they see fit. I do have a website, but I think that the percentage of people who have their own website, let alone, host it on their own hardware, from their own Internet connection, is rather small and I think that's too bad! We all have computers, we all have Internet connections, let us link them up and create a network of computers together! Part of what makes gopherspace interesting to me, is that I have the feeling that the percentage of people who are both using and providing the service is much higher, and there seems to be little to no commercial interest in it. It feels like the Internet, dude. Yes, Internet, with a capital I, because it is something special, and something more fragile than we think. Just imagine a world where you don't get free access to the Internet, but where your ISP will sell you "packages" with access to different sites and protocols, and likely not even the latter. A world where everything is a website, and the browser i the new operating system. No thank you sir! I prefer my executables on my harddrive, running on my CPU in it's native tounge (the irony here, is that this is served to you from a javascript....... I need to rethink that..). More gopher I hacked a bit on the server today.. The code is messy, and I see the results of coding when being too tired, making braindead mistakes. But I'm much more satisfied with the resulting Gopherhole. I realized that the index.html that I use at / via http is not relevant for the Gopherhole as it only contains links to the other things I host.. The gopher server I wrote already provides the indexing functionality, so I decided to hide the index directory and instead serve the /pages directory directly. I also reworked how the index.html in the other directories are treated, they now look much more like text files, except for them containing links, but I'm going to remove that as well. I discovered that it's entirely possible and not even unpleasant to browse gopher via netcat. It can be done like so: echo "/pages/phlog" | nc dusted.dk 70 I think that's really neat. - Time for bed