Dropping the Information

And……..another one bites the dust. The Gopher Information Repository, which I’m now calling the far more keyboard-friendly mari’s Gopher Repository, is complete. At least, all the pages are written. There will always be clients to dig into and I’ve not had much luck reviewing server software (gotta love Linux~), but as far as the stuff I really wanted in there, it’s finally done. Spent the entire morning (like the first four hours of my day) writing pages, polishing stuff off, mostly just because I wanted it done. It’s paid off, I’d say. Every single page is radically different, so even if you peaked at it before, I’d suggest you look again.

"Structure of a Gopher Menu" page
“Structure of a Gopher Menu” page

Honestly, mari’s Gopher Repository was a big embarrassment for a good year or so before I redid it. I had plans to scrape together all this information about it, give people a real good insight into starting their own server and putting content up on it, but it just didn’t come to pass. Then in May of last year, we took the Gopher offline anyway, and it just awkwardly sat up on my site, linked in the navbar, but unfinished. Not to mention the total lack of stylesheet, which originally I did because it was neat seeing something that looked the same in old and new browsers, just started to look broken to me.

Now? Not only is the information a lot more accurate and more detailed, but there’s just plain more of it than I even intended at the time. Plus, with some clever CSS margin stuff, I got things looking pretty damn close to how Netscape renders a Gopher menu, which satisfies me to no end. (That, and the parchment background. Glad I reconsidered my distaste for faded paper background textures, they’re actually hot.)

As for what got finished in this sprint:

It’s kinda crazy how I went from no projects to tons of projects in a matter of three weeks, but that’s the way I work, I guess. Either way, done and dusted for the moment, and finally back on the navbar like I originally intended. I can go back to trying to get other things finished up before Pennyverse Month.

Edit: holy shit, this is the 100th post on the Scratchpad. Figure it’s fitting that it’s a rather obscure triumph that nonetheless satisfies me. I’m mostly just amazed I’ve been able to keep this up this long, I figured I would’ve gotten bored by now. I’ll save the retrospectives for the one-year in November, though…

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