How Can I Setup My Gopherspace

2018.09.21

Original published by SDF at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/sdf/faq/GOPHER

The article in this content is specific to setting up a gopher hole on SDF (The Super Dimensional Fortress) Public Access Unix System. Visit sdf.org for more information on how to create an account.

This document was written with ‘mkgopher’ in mind. You may be managing your space from the UNIX shell, but since ‘mkgopher’ uses common UNIX commands, this should still be helpful.

SETUP

This will create the directory for the top level of your GOPHERSPACE. Your URL will be “gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/1/users/username” (or “gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/username”) where ‘username’ is your UNIX user id. During your ‘mkgopher’ session, this directory will be present. If you don’t create anyfiles or directories, the space will be removed to keep our site clean.

NOTE: Unfortunately, most web browsers do not render gopher pages properly, let alone grok Gopher URLs.

TITLE

Your GOPHER URL is gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/1/users/login (or gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/login) where ‘login’ is the UNIX user id you use to login to SDF. Your SITE name is your ‘login’. Since that is limited to 8 characters, you can use TITLE to set a 50 character or less title for your site.

DESCRIBE

For each directory you create in your GOPHERSPACE you can use the DESCRIBE command to create a detailed description. This entry is limited to 9 lines of roughly 50 characters per line.

MKDIR

Create a subdirectory within your GOPHERSPACE.

RMDIR

Remove a subdirectory within your GOPHERSPACE.

PICO

Edit and publish a document. You can also use this as a way to cut and paste text from your computer terminal to SDF. ASCII upload mode can also be used, just start sending text once you open the editing buffer.

UPLOAD

This should be used for large text files or binary data that cannot be transmitted via an ASCII transfer. UPLOAD uses the ZMODEM file transfer protocol which some terminal emulators support (TeraTerm ..)