WHY DOES THIS SITE LOOK SO CRAPPY?!


SHORT ANSWER:  It doesn't.

LONG ANSWER: It's a matter of perspective.  If you're approaching this 
site from the Web side of things, then I'm the first to admit that it's 
butt ugly -- just pitiful.  But if you're looking at this from a gopher 
point-of-view, then I'm actually rather proud of it.  See, this site 
begins life on a pygohperd server.  Yes, GOPHER.  That thing from the 
early '90's, still alive, still kicking.  And this particular 
incarnation has a very cool super-power: it creates a Web version of 
each and every gopher page on this site, on-the-fly, whenever a Web 
version of any of the gopher page addresses is requested.  Sweet, huh?  
It's like getting two servers for the price of one...except that this is 
Free (as in beer, as well as in speech) software, and it doesn't cost a 
dime.

This sweetness does have a price, though, and it comes in the form of 
occasional incompatibility with fussy operating systems and/or browsers 
(browsers especially -- SHAME on Mozilla for dropping gopher support in 
Firefox 4.X!); not to mention people's general unfamiliarity these days 
with the alien entity that is gopher.  Once the lion share of the 
Internet, gopher has now become a curious oddity (at best), or a point 
of ridicule (at worst).  In truth it is neither.  It is, quite simply, 
one of the easiest and most efficient ways to serve up content that I 
know of.  As a flat-file (read that, text) server, it has no peer; as a 
download source of larger media files, I suspect it will also excel.  
People have been using it to serve up audio and image files for decades, 
in fact, and now it's my turn to do the same.

I tell you, there's something very liberating about not having to worry 
over "themes" or "Web formatting" or whatever.  When you use gopher, you 
drop your files onto the server, maybe add a notation to a gophermap if 
you're using one (which is purely optional), and...that's it.  No muss, 
no fuss, no dicking around with CMS, CSS, stylesheets, or even HTML.  
Unless you want to.  Which I don't.  It defeats the purpose, see?

So you can hate my content if you want, that's fine with me.  But DON'T 
you be dissin' gopher, or we're fightin'!


Feb, 01, 2011
(c) 2011 lostnbronx
CC BY SA 3.0
lostnbronxATgmailDOTcom