[gopher] The Gopher Archive

[Kim Holviala]

I'm archiving Teh Gopher. All of it - well all textual searchable 
information, not binaries nor images...

Currently the archive has around 12000 files, but more files are 
downloaded every day. It's going to take about a month to download 
everything, but that's only because my crawler is trying to be nice and 
won't download big sites in on go....

It's pretty easy to use, just go to gophernicus.org, select "Browse Teh 
Archive" link and type in a hostname (or a full URL). You'll be browsing 
the archive in no time....

[...]

Yeah, I was bored. Below's the blurb I wrote as a foreword to teh archive.


- Kim


--------------------------------------------------------------------

  _______ __            _______               __
|_     _|  |--.-----. |     __|.-----.-----.|  |--.-----.----.
   |   | |     |  -__| |    |  ||  _  |  _  ||     |  -__|   _|
   |___| |__|__|_____| |_______||_____|   __||__|__|_____|__|
      _______             __     __   |__|
     |   _   |.----.----.|  |--.|__|.--.--.-----.
     |       ||   _|  __||     ||  ||  |  |  -__|
     |___|___||__| |____||__|__||__| \___/|_____|


The Gopher Archive is a project that happened accidentally. I wasn't
going to archive all of Gopher, I was just doing a search engine.

Really, I was.

Anyway, one day after crawling through thousands of Gopher documents I
realized that I had no reason to delete those files, and that I could
give folks easy access to those cached copies and call it "an archive".

Then I got greedy - I decided that it wasn't just any old archive, it
was going to be "The Archive". Mostly because there wasn't anything
else around.... Of course, only after calling it The Archive I realized
that I'm about 20 years too late, but that's ok. I like doing archaic
things like The Archive. Then again, I like playing with LEGOs too.

Interface to the archive is pretty simple. Just copy&paste the below
address to your favorite Gopher client, type in any hostname or a full
URL into the query box that hopefully pops up and off you go. As long
as the pages are found from the archive you'll stay there, and if you
happen to find a link that points to a place that hasn't bee archived
(yet) that's ok too - you'll be transparently redirected to the
original server (hopefully its still alive).

gopher://gophernicus.org/7/archive.q

That's about it. For a slightly easier to remember address just open
up gophernicus.org and select the "Browse The Gopher Archive" link.


Kim Holviala <kim at holviala.com>
22 April 2010