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Hello friends, I'd like to serve my capsule as a gopher hole too.
However I'd like to do it automagically through software.
Do you know any script or utility that does convert a capsule or GMI into text files suitable for gopher hole?
Thanks... 🙏
Jun 23 · 8 weeks ago · 👍 norayr
sorry this isn't a helpful comment, other than to say I've read about dual hosting solutions. I know there's a server that does it... GeGoBi? Something like that.
You are going to run into trouble with Unicode. Anything outside the dead simple ASCII range of 0x20-0x80 isn’t really supported on gopher. Unicode will screw up a lot of clients out there. Not just because of display, but also line limits and not knowing how to count multibyte characters.
This was one of the key problems Gemini was designed to solve.
If you still want to do it, you can write your own tool to convert gemtext to gopher text. Just hard wrap to 70 chars and prefix every line with i, and then convert all gemtext links to gopher links. There’s a whole mess of prefixes for that that will require hinting from the file extension or MIME type, but it’s not too hard.
It’s been a while since I did gopher, but unless I am mistaken you can only have one gopher file per directory. Essentially that one file is treated as the gopher map and will be parsed for links and navigation. Anything else in the directory is just plain text or octet-stream. Double check because this might require radically restructuring your capsule.
❄ freezr [OP] · Jun 25 at 23:49:
@istvan you got the point, I don't want to replicate my capsule as is, I am looking for a script that does all the plumbing to convert a Gemini Capsule into a well formed Gopher Hole automagically; something that I can run periodically with a cronjob and forget about it... 😎
You don’t really have an option except design your Gemini capsule to work structurally like a gopher hole would. And there’s no good way to Unicode to 7-bit ASCII.
You would have a much easier time converting a gopher hole to Gemini, otherwise a lot of stuff simply will not work.
❄ freezr [OP] · Jun 26 at 23:36:
@istvan I see, I really know nothing about Gopher... 🤔
❄ freezr [OP] · Jun 27 at 00:42:
I found several sources to take inspiration from...
— gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/1/~johngodlee
— https://www.ecliptik.com/Making-a-Gopherhole-and-Phlog/
I have my brainy friends that have the skills to achieve a Capsule-to-Gopher solution...
Really Gemini makes distributing linkable documents easier than Gopher, but the latter is more established and runs everywhere...
The alternative to Gopher would be serving my capsule with Spartan as well, and let ancient computers read our gemlogs... 🤔
Calling gopher “established and runs everywhere” is a huge stretch. Browsers haven’t included support for it in 20 years and most of the plugins to enable it died even before the plugins to re-enable FTP.
Yes, you can find gopher clients on Mac OS 8.6, but you can also find SSH clients and can just SSH into any Linux terminal and browse gemini from there.
I’ve gotten gemini clients working on MorphOS, OSX 10.4 for PowerPC, Haiku supports Lagrange, and everything else has some way to SSH to another terminal where you can run an ncurses gemini client.
What scenario is gopher more accessible?