Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021

Ten years
=========

I'm usually quite good with anniversaries: I remember when my kid and
wife were born, the date of my marriage, etc. But I forgot this one:

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~~ TEN YEARS AGO, ON JUNE 18TH 2011, MY GOPHERHOLE WENT ONLINE! ~~
   ------------------------------------------------------------

Time flies when you're having fun, they say. It was nice 10 years.
I managed to finish college, start a family, dug into several new
hobbies (like HAM radio), collected quite a lot of old hardware, and
found several thousand geocaches.

Around 2016-2017 there was a strong wave of newcomers to Gopher, 
which was why I created the Bongusta aggregator. It went from zero
to 40 aggregated sites in ten months and as there are not as many
newcomers as were back then, it never doubled the number since then.

Currently, there are 75 aggregated phlogs that had at least one post
in last 13 months and one exception, which is xmanmonk's phlog - 
I still hope that he will return one day, so I keep him aggregated.
This is decrease about four entries since the last time, as I had to
remove at least ten abandoned or not working phlogs. Fortunately,
there were several fresh new gopherholes with promising phlogs, they
were added and I hope, they will stay alive for good.

Gopher survived the coming of the Web 1.0, it survived the coming of
the Web 2.0, it survived the coming of social networks, it survived
the coming of the Gemini protocol and I'm quite sure it will survive
many others that will come in the future. Mine for sure will. 
You can't really upgrade plaintext to anything better.

So, to another ten years online!

P.S.: For the last several years I have asked the readers of my Czech 
blog every March 1st to send some small amount of money to keep my
server alive another year and to pay for all my domains. I never did
that here and I'm not going to make a custom of it, but I think that
this anniversary may be a good occasion. So if you think that my
humble gopherhole ever made a difference for you and if you can spare
some cryptochange, here are the weird strings:

BTC (SegWit): bc1qsc6j665ryzdzq9yra07yzlnllm24tr2xa2sc60
BTC (legacy): 13uyYXX9HH7eNuEa1Zv29juqCcnmb12283
ETH: 0xaE4209266F27813A93b2e60b5D4c82E784Aa7c35
DOGE: DHB9yYCdRM6PwHD49MWnY5U5XkMgY9HZmm