A carnival of technology

I’ve been publishing my crap on the Internet for a while now. The earliest gopher entry was on May 21st, 2004, a furious screed attacking the institutions and habits of the web, and what was at the time called by some the angriest six paragraphs they’d ever seen me write. Before that, I posted my thoughts to the front page of http://gophernet.org/, sorting things into an unnavigable sequence of days and archiving by quarter approximately whenever I felt like it. Sometimes I didn’t feel like it for six months at a time, so size of the front page was inconsistent. The earliest such writing I can find is from December 28th, 2000, a few months after I registered gophernet.org and settled in to life in the Smith building dorm. Before that, I had been using a dyndns domain for a few years, and I almost certainly had a “News” section on whatever page I used to fill that void. I honestly can’t remember what I did with that site, and the files themselves are certainly long lost. I think they lived on one of those huge (volume and mass, not capacity) hard drives I got off of one of those Egghead auctions [1]. Before that, I have vague memories of FTP clients and Geocities pages. I certainly hope that anything I did before 1997 has since been destroyed, but who knows; I might still have an active account or two out there somewhere. The thought of anything uploaded from an AOL account returning to haunt me doesn’t keep me up at night, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t deny my involvement if it were to happen.

Anyhow, my point in all this is what my point has always been with blogs: there is no new thing under the sun. I moved to gopher as a sort of escape, staking my claim in the forgotten backwaters of the Internet as a retreat and a solace from the ridiculous claims and breathless exaggerations of Web innovation. I still stand by the points in my May 21st manifesto—the Web is not the Internet, a turn-based protocol is not suitable for real-time applications, and Tim Berners-Lee is an asshole—, but I’ve thought about moving to what has become a more traditional form of a blog. I don’t want to become the next Cory Doctorwho or anything like that, and I pray that I’m never compared to him, but it might be time to face the realities of this place: I have readers, and a protocol that was dead by 1995 is not convenient for readers. In spite of itself, HTTP has managed to extend in some useful ways: recent years have seen a greater interest in foreign-people languages, which I take advantage of to type words like “coördinate” or “?????” (hint: this file is in utf-8. gopher doesn’t really have a means of conveying that information.) so I can be more pretentious; HTTP over SSL and various newer authentication methods make private content, though not necessarily easy, at least feasible, and MIME information can express file types in a way far more extensible than gopher’s single character in the URL. This doesn’t mean that I don’t still think that whatever google’s up to today is dumb, but it does mean that I think properly used HTTP transfers are pretty alright.

My plan so far is to install and use Nanoblogger, a blog engine that I discovered through clumens’s use of it and which I like for the fact that the interface is a shell script, and it doesn’t look like ass by default. There’s a bundle of of PHP scripts out there to add comment support [2]—a feature that’s been requested a couple of times—and, though the author writing nbcom “with famous KISS rule in mind” (rock and roll all night, party every day) seems like a handy idea, I’d like to make a couple of changes. I don’t feel like installing mysql, so I’d like either to replace the half-dozen or so calls to “mysql_hejaz” with “pg_hejaz” (easy) or figure out how those PEAR database abstraction classes are supposed to work (maybe not so easy). I’d also like to replace the authentication code with Typekey’s so that I can make user accounts someone else’s problem.

So, what do you, the reader, think? Consider this article a request for comments. I haven’t firmly decided on anything yet, but I figure that since I’ve been using gopher for over a year and a half, maybe it’s time for another format change.

References:
[1] http://gophernet.org/images/sd.jpg
[2] http://nhw.pl/blg/articles/nbcom/