Getting Started With Gopher

Using burrow

To create a gopher hole on tilde.institute, a user can easily get started by doing the following:

Create the gopher directory

$ mkdir public_gopher 

Create a root gophermap

$ burrow gophermap 

Gophernicus will interpret any text you add here as information lines unless they begin with one of gophernicus' special characters or contains a tab. As a general rule, don't use tabs unless you're intentionally linking something.

Add a cool header to the file (check out figlet!), then somewhere near the top, paste:

==== Last Updated: February 19th, 2019 ====

The date doesn't matter, really. Whenever you "phlog" with burrow it will update the date for you. How sweet is that?

Now lets add a link to your phlog that you're totally going to have:

1phlog[tab]phlog 

That [tab] should be a literal tab, though. Make sure your editor doesn't convert it to spaces. Now, save and quit the editor.

Create a phlog directory

$ mkdir ~/public_gopher/phlog 

Now create a new phlog with burrow

$ burrow phlog 

You'll be prompted for a title. If you hit enter and give no title then burrow will abort.

Once you hit enter after giving your title a temporary file will open in your default $EDITOR. Don't like that editor? Be sure to change your environment var!

If you quit your phlog file without saving the post is aborted. If you save and quit, it will create a new phlog entry, add it to your phlog gophermap that now exists, and update the date on your root gophermap. That's it!

You have an RSS file sitting in the root of your gopher hole at rss.xml. It will automatically generate when you phlog, like a winner. You can edit your root gophermap at any time by using burrow's gophermap action. If you create other folders and gophermaps in the future you can use burrow's gophermap function to target them. For instance, to open the phlog listings you would:

$ burrow gophermap /phlog 

Editing gophermaps with burrow will ensure they're always saved and formatted properly! Any other files are just text, so open them directly with your editor of choice.

That's it! Happy gophering.

~tomasino

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