On 2022-03-22, The Free Thinker <
freet@aussies.space> wrote:
James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:
What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.
Though well known, I'll mention The Internet Wiretap because it
might have been the first Gopher site that I really discovered, or
at least that got me interested enough to install a dedicated
Gopher browser rather than just viewing it in Firefox. At that
point it was very broken, obviously in some late state of
abandonment, and now it's dead altogether, but it's archived
at quux.org:
gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com
Interestingly, this leads me to another topic: kiwix. Over at kiwix.org, they are essentially making offline archives of websites that you can read on a computer, phone, etc. It includes Wikipedia, and also some videos like TED talks. I have prepared a ZIM (the offline file format) for gopher.quux.org and need to get on with getting it included in their catalog. Download from:
https://archive.org/details/gopher.quux.org-zim
For more on kiwix, see
https://www.kiwix.org/ The readers have integrated Bittorrent downloading of content, but you can browse what's out there at
https://library.kiwix.org/?lang=eng and
https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages (the clients have a nicer interface). Of particular note, you can download all of Wikipedia as text only,
or with images. Also all of Stackexchange is available.
There is a whole set of people experimenting with novel ways to use Zettelkasten-like approaches to presenting text information. For instance:
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ - sort of a ringleader of this space.
https://notes.arne.me/about-these-notes/ - with source on Github
Over on my own site at
https://www.complete.org/ I have taken to export the site
from an Emacs org-roam database, process it through hugo, and generate a static site that is almost entirely textual. If I've done things right, it has no external dependencies and features private search (for browsers that support Javascript, the search is performed locally so search terms are never leaked anywhere, not even to me.)
It would probably be possible to dump this to Gemini some day also, since the process is literally org-mode -> ox-hugo markdown export -> hugo -> static HTML.
(Note that Markdown step!) But I haven't had the time.
Over at
https://www.complete.org/old-and-small-technology/ I have some links to some interesting text-only or text-mostly sites:
- Low-Tech Magazine has a solar-powered website that, although it does contain a
few graphics, has compressed them to an extreme to conserve power.
- There's the Plain Text Project.
Also, in the past 6 months, I've gotten back into -- yes -- Usenet.
https://www.complete.org/usenet/ Not the Usenet that is the realm of warez, but the plain-text Usenet, which makes up the bulk of the groups. It is an odd mix of utter wasteland, troll heaven, and fantastic relevance. My favorite group right now is alt.folklore.computers. I learned about alt.coffehouse.amethyst here on Tilde, which is also pretty nifty.
I set up a Usenet server at quux, and offer peering to people over NNTP or NNCP.
- John
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