Kévin

The new internet is shit and we all know it, that’s why I’m having an inspired moment to re-do OH.MG / OM.Gay properly like our lord and saviour Sir Tim Berners-Lee would have wanted.

Well perhaps not him, because the work in progress version is actually running from the gopher server, so maybe don’t tell him about that part.

Granted what you’re seeing here is a workaround to what is running the gopher proxy, normally it would do a redirect into the gopher server itself and all would be revealed but I did need to include various links for things as well as lock down Apache so it does not proxy any old gopher server, thus allowing just anybody to promote any kind of shit on OH.MG. I run this thing from my house, I ain’t got electricity or the bandwidth to deal with the Police at my door about some elsewhere user content.

Anyways, I’m rambling, right now the gopher server is a total mess and there are some additional things I need to do to prepare the server for production so feel free to poke around as you wish. Nothing here is final but I can tell you this does not play well on mobile devices, so I wish you all the best of luck with that.

Mirrored from kinda sus.

In France we are now kept inside our homes and only let out for specific reasons, obviously this is for the greater good.

But when you can’t go do a thing you realise that being at home is quite boring. Don’t get me wrong, after a long week hiding for an entire Saturday is pretty exhilarating, but being at home for what will be a week as of tomorrow night is rather boring.

For a while I had work to keep me occupied all day, but now our hours have been temporarily reduced, so filling my time with activities, is well, trying. In fact, my cat now hates me for existing in her space.

But it also means I can do other things I really should have been doing for some time now, like working on my BBS, expanding my web presence, buying a shit tonne of domains, and doing up my gopherhole.

So far, I updated a single page on gopher.is, so we there, in the grove.

For a while now I’ve been running some old school servers, very text-based things like the famous BBS, but I’ve also more recently got into running a Gopher server.

If you don’t know what Gopher is, well, you’re in for a treat :

The Gopher protocol is a communications protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

Wikipedia

I always find it hard to run a service like this, since I host my domains using CloudFlare to filter out bots and shit that cause problems. Unfortunately it also means that I block non-standard ports at the root level in the process.

But I managed to find a domain that worked out well for this – gopher.is – which is only available via the Gopher protocol, to access it you’ll need a Gopher client or a Gopher web proxy. It’s the ultimate in text-only experience and from my end, a very lightweight server to run.