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by rhabarba 3391 days ago
Gopher comes without the multimedia annoyances of the over-engineered Web and it "lacks" people whose business model is to be on it. I like to browse Gopher every now and then. Several people I know even export read-only versions of their blog to Gopher.

I planned to write a new Gopher app for Android a while ago but I haven't finished it yet. This article reminds me to try again. Thanks.
2 comments
spc476 3391 days ago
I "ported" my blog to gopher as well (gopher://gopher.conman.org/) but it's not a clean port. The gopher client I use (an extension to Firefox) is not UTF-8 aware and thus there are character set issues. Also, there's some loss from the conversion of HTML to plain text (compare gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2017/02/27.1 with http://boston.conman.org/2017/02/27.1).

But it wasn't that difficult to do. And yes, I do see a few people hitting the gopher site.

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draven 3391 days ago
I just tested your blog with OverbiteFF (I guess that's the client you're using), and I had to manually switch the encoding to Unicode (View->Text Encoding.) I see there's an "item type" field in the protocol, it's set to 0 (ie "plain text file") for your blog entries. The protocol doesn't seem to offer anything to specify the encoding to the client, so overbite must default to something like plain ascii.
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NoGravitas 3391 days ago
Is there an existing gopher client for Android? I couldn't find one on the Play store, but that could be because of search problems.
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rhabarba 3391 days ago
Yes, the Floodgap guy has its own Android client available on his website. Sadly, it follows the design conventions from Android 1.5 or so.

http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/

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