So, why am I running this thing on a Gopher server, anyway?

That's a great question! The short answer is, "because I can." 

The longer answer, though, is that it's just plain fun to do, and computing should be fun.

All the way back in 2001 I decided that I wanted to register a domain name and make a 'real' website. One that didn't have a '~' in the URL, or was on Geocities or something. Something that I could call my own. Something that I could use to learn how putting together a web server, web software, and so on together to build something. That site, with its silly name, went on to be... well, not much, really. But it did teach me a whole lot about a whole lot. Like how DNS works, and how you should really stay on top of updates or your server will be compromised, and how to restore from backups, and how to install and use lots of different content management systems. 

In short, it was fun. In fact, I may have slacked off on doing some of my college coursework at home because I was screwing around with my web server in one way or another. Like staying up until 4:00 in the morning reinstalling everything because I was in the wrong folder when I typed in "chown -R www-data *" and completely hosed everything. And I might have spent a lot of weekend nights learning how Virtual Domains worked ("I can have more than one website on a webserver? This changes everything!")

And, since then, I've registered over a dozen domain names (I can stop whenever I want, I swear), and have set up and have taken down all kinds of websites running all kinds of content management systems: PHPNuke, e107, phpbb, phorum, b2evolution, Wordpress, Drupal, MovableType, Textpattern, Joomla, Gallery, and probably some other ones that I'm forgetting right now. 

But, the point is, every single one of those things was fun. I had a great amount of fun setting them up and using them for a while, some of them for a few years, even. 

Time moves on, however. The Internet changes and evolves. The web subsumes a lot of functions that used to be handled by other bits and pieces of the Internet. Stuff that was a mainstay is now replicated (sometimes poorly) in web 'apps'. 

IRC? Use Facebook or Twitter or Slack or something owned by someone else. 

Email? Use Gmail or Outlook 365 or something owned by someone else.

FTP? Use Dropbox or OneDrive or something owned by someone else.

NNTP? Newsgroups are mostly full of spam and pirated content, go to some forums or social media or something owned by someone else.

Heck, even the web itself is not what is used to be even five years ago. Mega sites like Facebook are becoming the de facto representation of the Internet for a lot of people. They see the world through the filter of Facebook, say, and anything else that doesn't show up in their newsfeeds doesn't exist.

It's not just Facebook, though. It's also Twitter, or Reddit, or Slashot, or whoever. It's sites that exist for no other reason than to keep you there, reading their message, and generating ad revenue, forever.

But the Internet is so much more than that. The Internet is a great place that breaks down the barrier to entry to facilitate communication and the sharing of ideas on a global scale, and there are lots of ways to share those ideas, other than posting them on someone else's server via a web browser. 

So, I decided that I would post some things on a gopher server. Gopher is a different way to present information than a website is (I'm not saying that it's better, just that it's different), and it's one that is interesting enough to me that I set up this site right here. And learning about technology is fun. Well, fun for me, at any rate. 

It also helps that I'm using the excellent pyGopherd server to familiarize myself with this stuff rather than having to write my own Gopher server.

So, I will be posting things here from time to time, and I hope I will inspire you to do something similar.