About
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About me
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I’m Christopher Williams. I’m your typical computer nerd.
I’ve been using Gopher since the end of 2024[1]. After
2025 began, I started developing software for Gopher: a
server (see below), an Asciidoctor text converter (for
nicely-formatted text files!), phlog posting scripts, etc.
(Developing your own server or phlog platform seems to be a
rite of passage in Gopherland.)
[1] I’d actually heard of it a couple years earlier but
browsed it only a little bit at the time.
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About this site
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This site is a personal project of mine that I created for
fun (but not profit). I plan to add content from time to
time that I find interesting.
You can reach this site on both Gopher and the Web (the Web
site is a proxied version of the Gopher hole, in fact).
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About this server
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As of 2025-02-11, this hole is running on an experimental
Gopher server that I’m developing. As of 2025-10-22, you can
now download this server’s source code[2].
HTML [2] https://github.com/abbrev/thirteen-gopher-server
This server can run CGI scripts, and I’ve been writing
simple CGIs using little more than sh, awk, sed etc. It
amazes me how far you can go with just Unix text processing
commands.
As of June 2025, this site is also using an experimental
Web-to-Gopher proxy to provide HTTP access and stunnel on
top of that to provide HTTPS.
As of August 2025, the Web-to-Gopher proxy handles HTTPS
directly. This allows for better request logging.
In case you’re curious, here’s a diagram of my site’s
current architecture:
.---------------. .-------------.
| Gopher client | | Web browser |
'---------------' '-------------'
| | |
| | |
Gopher HTTP HTTPS
| | |
| v v
| .---------------------.
| | Web-to-Gopher proxy |
| '---------------------'
| |
| .-----Gopher-----'
| |
v v
.---------------.
| Gopher server |
'---------------'
|
Magic
|
v
This server is currently running on an under-$2/month VPS[3]
that I found around 2019 to use for various purposes. I
highly recommend both LowEndBox and RackNerd for good deals
on VPSes (and no, I’m not paid to say that).
HTML [3] https://lowendbox.com/blog/2-usd-vps-cheap-vps-under-2-month/
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About the domain asciz.com
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At the end of March and the beginning of April, 2025, I got
on a domain hunting kick again. I did that once before,
several years ago, for the purpose of buying and reselling
domains for a profit. I think I managed to sell one domain
for a profit, but I probably lost a bit of money overall
with all of the other domains I registered and let expire.
Anyway, I digress.
This time I looked at any available five-letter domain
following various patterns—CVCVC, VCVCV, pronounceable
English-like words using an ngram-based word generator
that I wrote, etc.—and I found asciz.com among the litter
(sitting next to all the ‘abfoo.com’s and ‘ednev.com’s).
Being a longtime assembly programmer, I immediately
recognized its meaning.
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`.asciz` is a common assembler directive to insert
a string of characters followed by a zero byte (the
‘z’ in ‘asciz’). This type of string, known as a
“null-terminated string”, is also used in languages
like C.
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So I registered asciz.com. I’m tickled pink to have a short
(read: fairly rare) domain that actually means something.