This post was never published. It was written in September 2014 and sat as a draft in WordPress. The Gopher server is long gone, but the enthusiasm remains.

If you're following me on twitter (you should) you might remember that a few days ago I posted a link to my gopher site that I had set up on a DigitalOcean droplet, once I tweeted this to them I received $10 in credits from a DigitalOcean employee for being awesome, another reason to love DigitalOcean! :D

So I thought I should explain how I setup the droplet and what software I installed on it and most importantly, how I configured the PyGoHerd server and how it works, I am nowhere near an expert on Gopher, but I have had a fascination for the protocol since I was reading about "ancient" technology and software when I was 13.

So let's get started!

First of all, you are going to need a DigitalOcean account, you can use the promo code that I published in a previous post that will give you both $10 in credits as well as an additional $10 from the coupon code, so that is $20 credits in total which would give you pretty much 4 months of hosting for free, I get $25 credits as an affiliate, if you don't like that, then you can use a non-affiliate link.

Anyways, I am going to use Ubuntu 14.something as the host OS, the location is going to be New York City, because why not :P

The draft ended here. The tutorial never got past the intro. But somewhere in 2014, there was briefly a Gopher server running on port 70 in a New York City datacenter, serving pages to approximately zero people.