It looks like it took about four months, but since discovering how
Gophernicus sets Gopher "search" strings as environment variables
I've now finally got back to my Gopher currency converter project
and set it up over Christmas:

gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/currconv

In the mean time I did actually find that there already was one,
though I forget where it is. But it was just a proxy for a HTTP
currency converter, whereas mine does the conversions locally and
shows a rates list, and change indicators, and ASCII-art flags, and
the Bash script that generates everything actually also works as a
currency converter itself, and, yeah, I got carried away...

Next time that doing some genuinely productive programming looks
like too much hard work, I might try to do a world clock with
little ASCII analogue clock faces...

--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, The Free Thinker wrote:

I've now finally got back to my Gopher currency converter project
and set it up over Christmas:

gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/currconv

Wow, that's great.

Somehow, my amber-on-black terminal, desktop theme, and the converter's
ASCII flag display, made it feel very homey to use.

By the way, I didn't know that GNU Units comes with exchange rate fetcher;
I will have to try that sometimes. And with all the Gophernicus' footer
in conversion result, I guess that the processing was invoked from
executable Gophermap, rather than regular Gopher CGI?

On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, The Free Thinker wrote:

I might try to do a world clock with
little ASCII analogue clock faces...

Reading this somehow randomly made me think of ACME Software's
`globe` program. [1] I'm not sure how hard doing a sunlight map
as ASCII art is going to be, might be interesting to look at;
though showing just fancy analog clocks are also fine by themselves.

I don't have any fancy "Gopher applications" yet [2], but I'd probably
start from making a Tilde.club mailing list archive (both HTTP and Gopher); since I really, really, dislike Tildeverse mailing list archive viewer [3] which requires client-side scripting and also practices
browser discrimination based on U/A sniffing as well.

Regards,
~xwindows

-----

[1] http://www.acme.com/software/globe/

[2] My gopher site is currently just an art gallery.
gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/

[3] https://lists.tildeverse.org/hyperkitty/list/tildeclub@lists.tildeverse.org/
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:

On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, The Free Thinker wrote:

I've now finally got back to my Gopher currency converter project
and set it up over Christmas:

gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/currconv

Wow, that's great.

Somehow, my amber-on-black terminal, desktop theme, and the converter's
ASCII flag display, made it feel very homey to use.

Thanks. I added the last few flags that I found online last night.
Didn't find a Thai one though.

And with all the Gophernicus' footer in conversion result, I guess
that the processing was invoked from executable Gophermap, rather
than regular Gopher CGI?

Yeah, "regular" Gopher CGI wasn't entirely clear to me (not that I
tried very hard) so the executable gophermap approach was the path
of least resistance. Plus I wanted individual directories for each
currency anyway. One day I might get the script to generate
individual rates lists for every base currency.

The gophermap script is actually just a call to gopherconvert.sh,
with $PATH set to NULL so that only programs symlinked in the same
directory can be run. This does mean that I need links to all
programs used by gopherconvert.sh in every currency directory,
updated regularly by currencyconv.sh in case they change location
after a system update - my first experiment with using Bash
restricted mode for an extra layer of security.

On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, The Free Thinker wrote:

I might try to do a world clock with
little ASCII analogue clock faces...

Reading this somehow randomly made me think of ACME Software's
`globe` program. [1] I'm not sure how hard doing a sunlight map
as ASCII art is going to be, might be interesting to look at;
though showing just fancy analog clocks are also fine by themselves.

Nice idea. Though when I think of sunlight maps I then start
thinking of maps showing satellite orbits. This might never end. :)

I don't have any fancy "Gopher applications" yet [2], but I'd probably
start from making a Tilde.club mailing list archive (both HTTP and Gopher); since I really, really, dislike Tildeverse mailing list archive viewer [3] which requires client-side scripting and also practices
browser discrimination based on U/A sniffing as well.

Though seeing as we're here, perhaps subscribing Gmane to the
Tildeverse list might be an easier solution that works just as well?
Gmane is an old mailing list - NNTP (later also web) gateway, now
relaunched in NNTP-only form at news.gmane.io. Posting is possible
too (publicly accessible though, so you might have to work out a
restricted account for it if that's not desireable).

Lists can be submitted here:
https://admin.gmane.io/

--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113