Announcing jan.bio & ncgopher gemini support

Hi,

after a long time of lurking on this list, I've finally installed jetforce on
my server [1]. There is not much to see at the moment, but I'm working on it.

I've also implemented rudimentary gemini support in my gopher client ncgopher [2].
There are still a lot of rough edges, especially some keyboard commands that only
work on gophermaps and not on gemini, but it's getting better every day. I pretty
much use ncgopher as my primary gemini client and fix what comes along.

One of the issues that has come up with other clients is that they block
on binary downloads. ncgopher downloads files in background, indicating
the number of bytes read (a bit like lynx). This way, you can continue browsing
while downloading your favourite konpeito mix.

ncgopher is written in Rust, which some people hate and others love. I started
to implement this client to teach myself rust, so it's far from perfect.

However, the client is known to compile on FreeBSD (my primary system), OpenBSD,
Linux (tested on Debian and Arch), and OS X. Maybe Windows works as well.

More features will be coming available in the next weeks. Feel free to create
an issue on [2], if you encounter any bugs.

- Jan

[1] gemini://jan.bio
[2] https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher

-- 
 Fry: Where's Captain Bender? Off catastrophizing some other planet?

Howdy,

Both your server and client are now on the appropriate lists, thanks for sharing!
It's nice to see another combined Gopher/Gemini client on the list.

I think the fact that Gemini documents can straightforwardly link out to
content on other protocols without resorting to hacks is one of its
nicer improvements over Gopher.  Clients which support both protocols
make it easier to take full advantage of that.

On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 07:49:47PM +0200, Jan Schreiber wrote:
 
> One of the issues that has come up with other clients is that they block
> on binary downloads. ncgopher downloads files in background, indicating
> the number of bytes read (a bit like lynx). This way, you can continue browsing
> while downloading your favourite konpeito mix.

Hey, that's outstanding, good work!  I have always hoped that better
client design could be a solution to that problem, rather than adding
content length information into the response header.

Cheers,
Solderpunk