Tagged gophers

This idea has been bouncing around in my head for months now, I've

just finally gotten around to typing it out.

I've noticed that dokuja (whose gopherhole has a floppy drive

simulator[1], did you know?) very often includes tags in his phlog[2].

I don't think I've seen anybody else do this, but I could be wrong.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to "use" dokuja's tags, in the

sense of being able to see all phlog posts with a given that, they're

just...there.

The format is very simple, each phlog post just has a line like the

following near the end:

Tags: #bbs #telnet #gophers

It would be very easy to detect something like that

programmatically. Go through a phlog post line by line, if a line

begins with "tag" (case insensitive, and just those three letters, to

support e.g. "tags:", "tagged:", "tagged as:") and contains at least

one non-initial word beginning with # then it is considered a tagline

and all words beginning with # are considered tags.

It would not be too hard to write a script which monitored, say,

Bongusta[3] and Tomasino's exhaustive phlog roll[4], and scanned all

new entries once every 24 hours for tags, keeping results in a

database. A gopher front-end to that database could let you see all

phlogs, from anywhere in the phlogosphere, taged #bbs or whatever. I

think this would be a good way to search for content in gopherspace,

assuming people started using it, which would be far less effort than

Google-style full text search, but also far more effective than

Veronica[5]'s selector-only search.

Between VF-1, circumlunar.space and my retrogrouch Mastodon client

(not "launched" yet, but usable for the basics, email me if you're

really interested), I need another project like I need a hole in the

head, but if you've been looking for some interesting way to serve

gopherspace, you're very welcome to this idea. I would definitely

begin tagging my posts if I knew somebody was working on this.

Tags: #tags #gopher #search

[1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/~dokuja/fds

[2] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/~dokuja/phlog

[3] gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/en/bongusta

[4] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/moku-pona/

[5] gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/v2