A fresh coat of paint

If you read the web-based version of this blog, you might have noticed that it has recently received a minor makeover. Instead of the previous formatting in plain-text, there is now ACTUAL formatting happening, paragraphs can be re-flowed to fit on smaller screens, lines are actually lines and not just a bunch of hyphens, there are actual headings which are picked up by screenreaders, etcetera.

If you read this blog on gopher, you should have noticed... absolutely nothing. This post is about that.

For those unfamiliar: Gopher is a protocol much like the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (http) which is used to serve this web-page to you. However, instead of transferring hypertext (HTML) which allows for formatting, re-flowing, and all the other nice things mentioned in the introduction, the gopher protocol transfers mostly plain text files.

When I started this blog up again, my main intention was to start writing as soon as possible. As I mentioned in the first post on this blog (The return of the blog), the program I wrote to generate the front page was incredibly simple. I did not want to spend time to make something complicated, I just wanted something that worked. At the same time, I wanted to support both gopher, web, and rss as targets. To achieve this (still: without putting in much time so that I could start writing as soon as possible). I just formatted plain text which gopher could sever directly and then added VERY minimal html tags to the web version which basically told the browser: don’t do anything with this text, just show it as it is.

This approach was great, and it served its purpose in allowing me to write. At the same time though, it was quite a bad reading experience on smaller devices, and it did not allow for as much creativity in styling as I liked.

As such, since I had some time this summer, I wrote a new indexer which (amongst other improvements) added html tags to the plain text files that I was (and still am) writing in. These tell the browser where the paragraphs are, what is a heading and what is normal text. It recognizes, quotations, code-snippets, horizontal lines. It coverts the backticks and single-quotes I write

    “like this’’ 
				

To properly curved left-double-quotes and right-double-quotes.

“Like this’’[1]

This post is to call out to other writers who target these platforms that writing content which is nice to read for both gopher AND the web is indeed possible. And it is possible even if you don’t use and off-the-shelf solution such as markdown. The important thing is that – whatever formatting you use – you have to be consistent with it.

I for example underlined headers in the text version with hyphens for main headings and equals-signs for sub headings. This made it incredibly trivial for a program to detect these lines and add the relevant html tags to them.

Likewise, I always indent code blocks with tabs, and quotation blocks with The greater-then symbol.

This allows for easy detection, processing, and subsequent styling

    Insert code snippet here 
				

All the while without affecting the formatting seen by gopher readers.

This consistency in formatting allowed me to code up a completely custom parser in just an afternoon.

That being said, I did have to make some minor adjustments to some old posts. A rather funny bug was that if I had a paragraph immediately following a horizontal line, the whole block would be counted as a line, and the paragraph would not show up on the web version. I decided to leave this in as a feature and just move all paragraphs away from the horizontal lines instead.

There were some other inconsistencies In my writing particularly when it came to lists. I decided (since it was much much easier to program this way) that all lists should henceforth be indented. This was a minor change since I don’t use lists overly much.

And that is all. I hope this might be useful to some other writers in the gopher space. If you want to check out the new indexer/parser, you can find it on my Codeberg page[2].

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.