Friday, August 17th, 2018

	On GopheRing
	~~~~~~~~~~~~

Again, many weeks  passed since I  posted  anything here, but what are
some weeks in gopher  history? Now there is a topic, I have  something
to add to, so sit down, put on your reading glasses and let's start. 

This week I  finally managed to get  a decent  internet  connection to
our  current  living place,  so I could  do a bit of gopher  browsing.
I came across Tomasino's post[1] about gopher rings and I have to say,
I too have fond memories of webrings and I would like to see something
like them on gopher as well. 

You see,  webrings were better than fulltext search, because they were
managed. Fulltext search, no matter how well designed and intelligent,
is still just a search - it can return  irrelevant pages, just because
they contain some words. Managed webring, that was tied to some topic,
usually offered both relevant  and current content. I loved that, even
though  that  was the  cause of  death of  webrings: as the web  grew,
nobody  had  the  time to  manage  more  and more  and more  pages and
fulltext became better than it was, though never perfect. 

But  a year ago, when I created  Bongusta!, webrings crossed  my mind.
That's why I bother  to manually  manage  the phlog list, to wait  few
weeks or even months  before adding newbies and to delete  non-working
or no longer updated phlogs.I wanted it to be as good as webrings once
were, to be  the showcase  of what gopherspace  currently is,  just as
webrings once were the showcase of their particular interest fields.

And  today, with adding  another three phlogs to the list, I added one
feature of  webrings, that I  missed most - Exit to  random phlog. The
menu  item  is in my  top-level   gopher  menu, so  any  random gopher
wanderer can find it. It was just few lines of bash  scripting and for
me the  feeling is now  complete.  Webrings  won't  come back from the
death, long live the GopheRing!

[1] gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20180811-gopher-rings