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GopherNews

GopherNews Root Selector

GopherNews is a simple text-only Google News reader for the Gopher
protocol.

The goal of this project is to provide an ultra lightweight Google News
service for old computers. This project takes heavy inspiration from the
68k.news website written by ActionRetro. GopherNews isn't an attempt to
replace his project, but is intended to be another option for very old
computers, or computers with extremely limited internet connectivity.

GopherNews can be accessed on Gopher via the following URL:

    gopher://gophernews.net:70

You can use any Gopher client to access GopherNews, but I have personally
tested lynx, Turbo Gopher, and Netscape. For the best experience possible
you should use a monospaced font while using GopherNews (some clients like
Turbo Gopher don't default to one).

If you are unable to use Gopher for some reason, you can also access
GopherNews via a Gopher to HTTP proxy at the following URL:

    http://gophernews.net/

I don't make any promises about the performance of the HTTP proxy, it
may not perform well under even moderate traffic. If at all possible
please use GopherNews directly via Gopher.

Tech

GopherNews is running on a basic 5$/m shared Linode server which should
easily withstand any amount of traffic it receives (I don't expect much!).

GopherNews is built using a Flask extension called flask-gopher written
my Michael Lazar. Without this extension I wouldn't have considered writing
this project, so my sincerest thanks goes out to him for his work. Thanks
for helping keep Gopherspace alive Michael!

In terms of actually getting news content GopherNews reaches out to
Google News for RSS feeds, gets a list of articles and their links,
and then fetches the article's HTML when selected by the user. This
HTML is then cleaned up via python-readability and turned into plaintext
via html2text. Some other minor manual cleanup occurs, but all in all this
is a very trivial process.

Blacklisted News Sources

Although I don't want to have to block any news source from GopherNews,
in reality some simply aren't a good fit. I have chosen to only blacklist
news sources for technical reasons, no source has been blacklisted due to
my own personal political opinions.
Examples of reasons I might block a news source are as follows (but not
limited to):
You can view a list of all blacklisted sources and the reason via the
/blacklist selector.

Final Words

I'm always open to feedback on my projects and would love to hear from
you. You can reach out to me via my contact information.

Have an idea for GopherNews? Please submit a PR :)

Links

GopherNews Repo
GopherNews (Gopher)
flask-gopher

Screenshots

News List

Article

News