May is Gopher month, and Pituophis, a project I hadn’t worked on since last year has finally gotten some of the treatment it deserved. 1.1 is now out with a bunch of changes.

I’ve refactored a ton of stuff, changed things around, etc. etc., and on top of that wrote a graphical Gopher client (in 200 lines!) to demonstrate it. Long timers may remember this essay I wrote on the Somnolescent blog mid-last year; while this doesn’t implement all that desktop integration stuff I’d love to see in a Gopher client eventually, it does implement the tree view part, at least partially. Consider it a proof of concept. Maybe not the most pretty looking thing in the world, but decently functional.

It doesn’t stop there though, as I caved and cleaned up Gophew a whole bunch, which is a couple of scripts for hosting a search-enabled server. It’s running on the new and rejuvenated Somnolescent Gopher server as we speak.

Looking forward to doing more with this protocol soon. It’s good to be back.