K3CAN

This blog is also available via gopher! And here's how:

Gophernicus

As I mentioned in my previous post, my gopher server of choice is Gophernicus. One of the benefits of Gophernicus is that it will automatically generate gophermaps based on the files in it finds in a directory. This means that adding entries is as simple as dropping a file into the directory. The next time that server is accessed, the new file will appear automatically.

Mirroring

All that remains is finding a way to easily add files to the gopher directory. Since I already have this blog, I decided the first thing I wanted to do was to mirror these posts into the gopherspace. This blog uses Dotclear, which provides a plugin to access an RSS feed for the blog. By fetching (and then parsing) this feed, I can export the contents into text files accessible to gopher. I wrote a perl script to accomplish this and created systemd units to execute that script on a recurring schedule to pull in new entries. The full source code is available on my github. The script uses LWP:Protocol:https to fetch the RSS feed and XML::Feed to extract the title, date, and body of each entry. The date and title are used as the file name, and the body is reduced down to plain text and then written to the file.

If you'd like to use the script, it should, probably, maybe work with other RSS and ATOM feeds, but some feeds can be a bit loosey-goosey about how they handle their XML, so no guarantees.