= 2025-07-05 Saturday =
=======================

This is my first published gopherlog.... phlog

It's a learning exercise at setting up a directory structure
and gophermap for my new gopherhole

++++


= 2025-07-06 Sunday =

What's happening here?  
======================

I started all this when I came across a You Tube video extolling
the virtues of building your own "personal web site". It came at
the right time, as I'd just re-discovered a folder hidden on my NAS
drive containing a snapshot of the HTML files that formed an old
Website I had back when I was first getting online, and leraning
Linux and HTML etc. Some of the pages must date back to 1999, and
it has stuff through to around 2001.

I've put the old website back [1] on a VPS for old time's sake, and
I'm struck by how plain and simple it was. No CSS, a few small very
compressed JPGs and some GIFs. 

No styling. 

Just content.

The You Tube video (and a few more that I subsequently found)
sparked the idea that YES we should take back the fun of the old
internet.

That I should build a new website. Host it myself and fill it
with my stuff. 

Like the olden days, put stuff online in your own terms.

The premise is that it's a way of taking back ownership of your
presence on the internet. A way to share with other like-minded
people. A way to break the dependance on the corporate advertising
AI algorithm driven modern web.

So I began. 

This time I decided to learn CSS. To <STYLE> it properly. And I
spent a few days getting to grips with the new paradigm for
websites... 

The result is [2] a simple website, with very little content yet.

I found though that it was way too easy to get engrossed in the
<STYLE> aspect and ignore the content.

Then I found another niche on the web - a club of "no-css" websites.

Just Plain HTML. 

Just hand written content.

Sort of what I used to have, back in the day.

So it's still a thing after all.

I got to thinking about what we've lost since those times. 

The Web is no longer a place to inhabit and to exercise your
creativity - it's run by corporations for profit. You "consume" the
web - and you're consumed by the corporations.

I don't do Social Media (anymore).

So where else is there?

Even searching on Google is now totally useless for finding actual
content, written for and by normal people. 

All it gives is opportunities to buy from commercial sites. It's
ALL adverts. The whole Web is now just a massive shopping mall.
Online shopping, the commercialisation of the web, is good (in
parts) as it allows you to find things you might want/need that are
not available locally. I live on a Scottish Island, online shopping
is very useful to me. (That it also brought about the closure
of various specialist shops here, and reduced the options to buy things
locally is another topic)

So where else is there?

I found, from my initial discovery of the "plain HTML" website
clique that even GOPHER still exists!

I remembered it vaguely, I think I'd used it back in the late 90s when
the internet was still a mish-mash of competing protocols. Google
hadn't been formed. There were multiple search engines of variable
usefulness. 

There was USENET, IRC, GOPHER, TELNET, FTP. 

The "Web" was just one of these different online spaces. 

Now it's everything....

Or is it?

GOPHER still exists and it's like a breath of fresh air to use it
again.

I found that IRC still exists!

USENET seems to have disappeared though, sadly. 

=========================================================
UPDATE..... USENET STILL SEEMS TO EXIST - I WILL INVESTIGATE

www.eternal-september.org
==========================================================

Social Media has [all but] killled it. Web Forums are the nearest you get.
And even these are pretty niche nowadays, with Social Media,
Facebook groups etc., now dominating the field of "interest
groups" .

There's also Gemini which is new to me, I know NOTHING at all about it. 
I'll look into it once I've got a better foorhold in GOPHERSPACE.


[1] https://g4slv.info/Website/ 

[2] http://g4slv.cloud/pages/index.php


== 2025-07-06, Wednesday ==

I've made a Gemini Server!

After reading of the gemini project I thought I'd have a go at
hosting a Gemini capsule, alongside the Gopherhole I'm slowly
building.

I followed the advice to use molly-brown as the server in a blog
post [0] I found. It seemed the quickest way to get started.

It's running now, and I'll look at whether I need to change to
another server (e.g. agate) after I've amassed some content.

Although I like gopher, from my limited recent exposure, I think
Gemini might be an interesting thing to get involved in. There's a
risk, of course, of duplicating effort and getting bogged down in
trying to do too many things instead of concentrating on one.

Let's see how I get on. 

The prototype gemini capsule is here:

gemini://g4slv.cloud

There's not much to see, but I'll copy across a few pages, and play
with the gem markup to see how it looks and how much easier it is
to read, and to add links to other pages directly in the page -
something that's not really possible in Gopher, unless you "cheat"
and make your pages all of the gophermap type.






[0] https://notes.zkbro.com/self-hosting-a-gemini-capsule/
====== Mastodon & Twitter ======

--- //John Pumford-Green 20/12/22 07:39//

I recently tried Mastodon - the distributed,
not-powered-by-advertising, not-run-by-megalomaniac-billionaires
social media platform.

This was after years of "not-using-Twitter". I didn't use Twitter
for a variety of reasons. One was "what's the point of it?" and
another was "I don't like AI and Algorithms deciding what I should
see" and another was "I ABSOLUTELY HATE ADVERTISING".

I'd looked at Mastodon a few times over the last year or so, but
thought "what's the point of it?" and "everyone else is on Twitter
anyway".

Then Elon Musk took over Twitter and there seemed to be a mass
exodus of people, and Mastodon was where they were going. 

So I set up a Mastodon account and started to explore.

Initially it seemed to make sense - I had an account on an
"instance" centred around the radio hobby, and most of the postings
were interesting (or at least "on topic") and it looked like it was
possible to get involved, make "friends" and share experiences, and
even post/read/enjoy the odd off-topic item.

I couldn't shake off the annoyance I felt that many of the posts
were references to things still going on "over in the other place",
"on the Bird Site" etc. Lots of Twitter-in-jokes and references,
that made no sense to people who had no interest or previous
connection with Twitter, and were probably also annoying to people
who had "escaped" Twitter and were enjoying the new atmosphere of
Mastodon. 

Carrying over old Twitter baggage started to dominate (as I saw
things) as more and more "refugees" made the jump. 

Endless "have I done the right thing?" or "I'm here now, what do I
do?", or "This doesn't work like Twitter, I don't like X, Y or Z".

... then the floods of "memes" referencing ongoing Twitter
happenings...

In my mind if you leave Twitter and join Mastodon you don't need to
keep dragging over Twitter-related posts, jokes, comments, memes.

I started trying to filter out content I didn't want to wade
through, stuff that made no sense to me (as a non-Twitter user),
then I started un-following people that persisted in filling up the
timeline(s) with such stuff.

Then I thought "What's the point of this?"

I'd managed perfectly well without Twitter all these years.

I was now spending more time trying to "clean up" my Mastodon
timeline & home feed than I was happy with. 

So I decide "No. It's not for me"

and Deleted my Mastodon.radio account (as well as the account I'd
set up but not yet used on Mastodonapp.uk)


Enough was enough. 

I'm just not a "social media microblogging" kind of person, I
suppose.





{{tag>mastodon, twitter}}


= 2025-07-13, Sunday =

I've been trying to improve my rough (my stuff is /always/ rough)
gopher aggregator.

I have stopped it updating the output gophermap every time it runs,
adding the datestamp even when there's nothing new to add to the
list.

Now it only adds new lines when a phlog has changed.

I've improved the "name" displayed for a phlog. Initially I was
using the "name" as the file-name used to keep the md5sum hash of
each queried phlog. This meant I couldn't have white spaces in the
phlog's name. Now I strip the whitespace when making the filename
to hold the last md5sum hash, but use the full whitespace-included
name when writing the index page. Looks better.

I've added a header and footer - the header gives a description of
the aggregator and the footer has some fixed links.

I've also made it automatically save a copy of the current
phlogroll, and the aggregator script itself, with selectors for
them at the foot of the page, these selectors are in the footer
that gets appended each time it refreshes the index.

Some amount of refreshing my memory of bash and awk were needed.

I haven't seen what happens if a phlog page isn't reachable - does
it hang, crash, give up and continue with the next one? I could
simulate this and find out, I guess.

I also haven't thought about curtailling the index. At the moment
it'll grow indefinitely, adding newly changed phlogs at the top of
the index. I guess I don't need to keep more than a few weeks'
worth of changes around?

Add it to the todo list.

I'll leave it running under Cron, daily (or more often for
testing...) and see how it goes. I must also find new phlogs to add
to the list.

There's only /so/ much time in the day to tinker, and so much time
I can spend reading all the interesting material I'm finding as I
delve into Gopherspace.

--g4slv


= 2025-07-06 Sunday =

I thought there were no free USENET NNTP servers left and that the
protocol was dead....

I was wrong!

I read on gopher.icu [0] that there was another phlog about USENET
on box.matto.nl [1] and found that there's a German USENET server
at news.eternal-september.org that's free (needs a registration of
username).

matto's post also shows how to configure slrn!

I used slrn in the distant past and have now got it set up and
working on eternal-september

This is another piece in the jigsaw of regaining my old love of
simple internet services.

I used to participate in uk.rec.sheds back in 1998/99 and I see
it's still going strong, and I even recognise some of the
user_names from that time, over 25 years ago!!

A year or so ago I had a go at using some of the old clients again.

I even connected a serial terminal to a linux box and started using
Pine (or whatever has replaced it) for email. I wanted at that time
to use slrn but found no usable NNTP server at my ISP, and assumed
that the protocol had gone. Google used to provide web access to
NNTP groups and that had gone.

I'm really happy to have a working NNTP client.

I've spent a few hours installing AntiX Linux (no X, no GUI, plain
text virtual consoles only) on an old Samsung N150 netbook.

Now I've got :

UMN Gopher client Lynx SLRN

Should I find Pine too, and really roll back the years?

I'm tempted to sign up for an account at one of the pubnix servers,
and join in the community. It all seems to be synchronicity...

-- 

[0] gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Usenet-update.md 
[1] gopher://box.matto.nl/0/usenet-getting-started-guide.txt