Deber's blog

To day, I have released an updated version of Nb2Gopher. More....

I launched, a few days ago, a new projet: nb2gopher. This soft is a converter for the weblog engine NanoBlogger to the Gopher version of a blog, also named "phlog". A phlog is a short for "gopher log". The purpose of a phlog is quite similar of a blog. The main difference between a phlog and a blog is that the first one runs Gopher protocol and the second one runs HTTP protocol.

One could ask me: "What is this Gopher protocol that I've never heard?". There is some information from Wikipedia. But, to tell you roughly: The Gopher protocol is the predecessor of the World Wide Web. The Web was created twenty years after the Internet beginnings. Earlier than the web, the popular way to explore a Campus-Wide Information Systems was Gopher. It facilitated access to resources like downloading documents, Telnet or phone directory. A powerful research engine, named Veronica, embedded in the Gopher service of this university campus network, was the ancestor of Google. When the Hypertext appeared, the Gopher network became suddenly obsolete. However, there is to day about 200 Gopher sites that are still in activity all over the world. So, what is my interest for this oldie? Not nostalgia! The Gopher protocol is better to download a set of documents than the anonymous FTP protocol. To provide a simple page of text (like a post of a blog) Gopher is much better than HTTP. Because Gopher protocol is very simple and makes its implementation easy on any kind of computer, included embedded computer like smartphones. In short, this protocol could be a successor of micro bloggers, that are frustrating by their too short messages. And now, what is the relationship between NanoBlogger and Gopher?

Suppose that you want something looking like a micro blogger, but with more verbosity. Saying that, the layout must be a page of plain text. This page has to be splitted in paragraphs, lists and so on. Because a page of plain text without separates blocs is absolutely unreadable. Suppose that you write a post for your blog. This post has need to be formatted in HTML to provide a layout for a web page. With an utility able to convert an HTML page into a plain text, you will have just to translate your blog post from HTML to plain text. And so, you have a phlog post!

Nb2Gopher does that! It reads posts written in HTML (raw format of Nanoblogger) and uses a converter like the browser "Lynx" to make the conversion into a plain text. More, it provides a menu in which you can find the lasts posts, a list a categories with sub-menus and per year list with statistics. As a blogger using the web log engine NanoBlogger, you bring into a Gopher server a text version of your web log posts. If you run your own web server at home, you are able to install a Gopher server. For people using a smartphone running the Android operating system, there is a least one client able to reach Gopher sites.

May I imagine these millions of smartphones running their own embedded Gopher server and growing the gopher space in the future?