Website now compatible gopher !

Author: Solène

Date: 11 August 2016

Tags: gopher networking lisp

NILMy 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?](http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/relevance.html).

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)).

Gopher is nice, don't let it die.