I am at work right now... during my lunch hour I noticed some interest on Mastodon in the Project Gutenberg gopher frontend rewrite.
First a note on the present code: I wrote it for myself. It was for my own use case, and worked fine for me. I decided in a "what the hell, why not?" kind of move to contact Project Gutenberg about it not expecting much. To my surprise, they went for it. They installed Gophernicus and hosted it even.
There it sat. I had a link to it, and there were a few comments in gopherspace about it, but nothing major. The Dr. Newby from PG contacts me saying essentially that no one's using the site. So a post is made to the Gopher Project email list and woosh... people are hitting it. Bugs are found. Enough for me to just say screw it and scrap the current php5 codebase and start over.
The rewrite is in bash/awk/sed/curl and will be all gopher native instead of gophermaps with links to type h URL:'s. I have the config and main gophermap completed. I have a mindmap sketching out the rest. When I get some off days next week, I will put some work into this. The motivation is different this time around: it is not just for me. The comments of several people have encouraged me to see this project in a different light.