A few months back I built a tool to cross-compile my Hugo blog into one that can be accessed via the Gopher protocol.
More recently, I built a CI/CD pipeline on my GitLab* instance which automatically compiled and uploaded my website to AWS. I won’t cover that here, but I found a wonderful and perfect guide for it.
Sometime yesterday I decided to take this all one step further and integrate my hugogopher into that CI/CD pipeline.
TL;DR: Play my little game here for web users or at gopher://gopher.judges119.me:70/labyrinth for Gopher users.
Gopher I’ve written some posts recently about the Gopher protocol and how I’ve been exploring and playing around with it a bit. I don’t know what attracts me to it so much, potentially just the simplicity of it, the relatively unknown nature of it across the modern web/dev crowd, or even just the desire to resuscitate a dead standard.
Having played around a bit with Gopher lately I decided to take the next step and try and create something more meaningful then test directories and dummy text files. My ultimate goal was to have this personal blog available via Gopher as well and I’m pretty confident that I achieved it. You can visit gopher://gopher.judges119.me and you’ll be able to browse my personal, dev, and ops blogs via the Gopher protocol.
Released in 1991, Gopher was a protocol designed for retrieving documents over the internet and a direct competitor/predecessor to the World Wide Web. The system of hierarchical menus and documents made it excellent for information organisation and allowed digital libraries and interconnected directories, bridging gaps between research campuses. It’s simple protocol was also well suited to text-only output devices, but the rise of graphical user interfaces probably assisted in it’s slow demise compared with the lurid layout and formatting capabilities of HTML.