Website now compatible gopher !

My website is now available with Gopher protocol ! I really like this protocol. If you don’t know it, I encourage you reading this page : Why is Gopher still relevant?.

This has been made possible by modifying the tool generating the website pages to make it generating gopher compatible pages. This was a bit of work but I am now proud to have it working.

I have also made a “big” change into the generator, it now rely on a “markdown-to-html” tool which sadden me a bit. Before that, I was using ham-mode in emacs which was converting html on the fly to markdown so I can edit in markdown, and was exporting into html on save. This had pros and cons. Nothing more than a lisp interpreter was needed on the system generating the files, but I was sometimes struggling with ham-mode because the conversion was destructive. Multiple editing in a row of the same file was breaking code blocks, because it wasn’t exported the same way each time until it wasn’t a code block anymore. There are some articles that I update sometimes to keep it up-to-date or fix an error in it, and it was boring to fix the code everytime. Having the original markdown text was mandatory for gopher export, and is now easier to edit with any tool.

There is a link to my gopher site on the right of this page. You will need a gopher client to connect to it. There is an android client working, also Firefox can have an extension to become compatible (gopher support was native before it have been dropped). You can find a list of clients on Wikipedia.

Gopher is nice, don’t let it die.