"Why Phlog?"
by William Stone III <wrs@wrstone.com>
http://www.wrstone.com
Updated Thu Jan 19 18:54:13 UTC 2017
Copyright (c) 1965-2065 William Stone III
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A phlog is a type of daybook, similar to a blog, that runs off a
Gopher protocol server. These phlogs are typically hosted from home
servers running some sort of UNIX operating system because a user
account on the server is usually required to update the content.
- Wikipedia
Why would anyone intentionally choose the Gopher protocol to host one's
content? Isn't it 2016? Can't you host HTML on SDF.org? Can't you drop it
into S3 or GitHub? Aren't there a frak-zillion free blogging platforms, on
SDF.org and elsewhere?
All of these options are available. However, there are issues which most
bloggers overlook when choosing their platform (or have it imposed on them by
an employer).
The primary issue is data survival. Storage changes. The way you store data
today will not be the same way that you store it in ten years. Information
technology simply advances too quickly.
This was driven-home most starkly a few years ago when I recovered a novel
manuscript for author L. Neil Smith.
Being a science fiction writer, Neil was an early adopter of computers. The
manuscript in question had been written on a pre-Wordstar word processor. The
underlying operating system was CP/M. The files were stored on 5.25" floppy
disks with a weird proprietary architecture.
I was able to recover the manuscript, but only through much effort. In the
process, it lost all its proprietary formatting. Plain ASCII was the only
thing left.
Since almost the beginning of computing, the only thing that's stayed the same
is plain, old, simple ASCII. Consequently, I've decided to head off
obsolescence by saving my phlog in simple, flat ASCII files. My intent is to
consolidate everything I've written into my phlog.
This happens to translate easily into Gopher. The protocol is
perfectly-designed for text. Using a few UNIX commands, I can write new
entries as text files, and they become live immediately.
I'm also a big supporter of SDF.org. I've had a MetaArray-level account since
it existed; and an ARPA account a decade before that. SDF offers Gopher as
well as numerous other services, including conventional Web hosting.
SDF.org is also very much a community for command-line jockeys like myself.
If the command-line is your native environment, create a free account and
run the "bboard" command. All you need to open a free account is:
ssh new@sdf.org
(If you're in IT and are not a command-line jockey, create a free account
and learn it. You can't do all that cool Mr. Robot stuff if you don't know
the command-line.)
Gopher hosting at SDF.org ensures reliability. As they are simply flat ASCII,
I leave the backups to the system. In the decades I've had an account, SDF
has never lost my data.
I can also back up to numerous other cloud services; either to or from
SDF.org.
Finally, I'm moving to Gopher because the US Federal Government has created
a "Ministry of Truth." That's not what they called it, but that's what it
is.
This represents a dramatic departure from the US' lofty goals of freedom of
speech. It can only result in Web sites and bloggers being takien off the
Internet.
By making my blog and content more "under the radar" than before (on a
platform that has to date lasted almost thirty years!), perhaps my content
will be available longer.
Sure, it's not as pretty as Wordpress. At the end of the day, how much of a
graphical interface do you need to read text?
Believe it or not, they used to do it with dead trees.
-30-