Phytocodex: access the Macintosh Garden from gopherspace

[smammy]

Ever wanted to download software from the Macintosh Garden directly to your System 6 Mac? Now you can: I've written Phytocodex, an independent index of software on the Macintosh Garden, accessible via Gopher.

Today I released v1.1! The "big" new feature is file downloads over Gopher, for clients that don't support "GET /" pseudo-selectors for HTTP downloads. This should make it possible to directly download software from Macintosh Garden using TurboGopher on System 6 (although I haven't actually tested that yet, oops).

Gopher: host phytocodex.porcupine.club, port 70
Landing page: https://phytocodex.porcupine.club/

Feedback welcome!

 

[kerobaros]

Hey this rules, thank you. Have you/would you put up your python crawler somewhere?

 

[DarthNvader]

Good god, System 6!

Been a long time since I used that, must have been 1993.

Great app, I should really get into the old 68k's again, you guys do some cool stuff with them.

 

[nathall]

I’ll give this a shot this weekend with the IIsi.

 

[smammy]

Hey this rules, thank you. Have you/would you put up your python crawler somewhere?

Thanks, it's been pretty fun to hack on. The source (such as it is) is up on GitHub, but I worry that other people will try to run their own crawlers and won't be as careful as I've been to avoid making trouble for @fogWraith. (My crawler is behind a very aggressive caching proxy, in addition to its built-in caching.)

 

[Slimes]

The technical debt of the garden is already insurmountable. Using a database for file access and descriptions is a bad idea.

Just use the filesystem. All data can be put in a directory of directories.

The garden is not really usable on classic mac. HTTP transfer rates on even G4 machines is brutal.

A flat filesystem can be used by all sorts of server protocols.

As far as authentication, there are solutions to make accounts. That's beyond this purview. I cant even delete an 'app' i uploaded on the garden.

Search is a non issue when the filesystem is properly hierarchical. Mind you, a web interface could allow for search of a flat file system anyway.

 

[smammy]

The technical debt of the garden is already insurmountable.

(etc.)

Not sure how this is relevant to my project but thanks for your perspective.

 

[Slimes]

Your index of the garden is great. It's how it should have always been.

 

[obsolete]

I tried this out on my SE yesterday with TurboGopher on System 6 and it works great! Thank you for building it.

 

[superpete]

Nice! I did a C# implementation some years ago. https://github.com/pgodwin/GopherServer

 

[kerobaros]

The landing page is still live, but it looks like the gopher server is down. @smammy are you still with us?

 

[smammy]

The landing page is still live, but it looks like the gopher server is down. @smammy are you still with us?

Thanks for the heads up! Finally got around to checking on it, and it looks like it's working right now. Not sure what happened. It's supposed to restart if it crashes.

 

[kerobaros]

Finally found some time tonight, and successfully connected to the server with TurboGopher on my Pismo. Thanks smammy!

 

[Some_Person]

Looks like this has been offline for a while. Are there any plans to revive it?

 

[obsolete]

Maybe the service is getting 403'd by Macintosh Garden, like a lot of people are now? They seem to have gotten really aggressive blocking ranges of IP addresses lately.

 

[smammy]

Hi all, sorry for the downtime. I rebuilt my server recently and never re-set-up Phytocodex. I've been super busy lately but I'll try to get to it soon.

 

[smammy]

Okay, I got it up and running again. I'm glad people are (trying to) use it!

 

[smammy]

Hi again, the Phytocodex gopher service has been hanging oddly every few days, requiring a manual restart. I changed some service settings so that it gets restarted every day or so. This should help it stay up and running more reliably. Thanks!