Creating Links to other Gopher Sites
====================================

It took me some Googling to figure this out. From what I've read, the
gopherd manpage has extensive documentation of the gopher protocol. Please 
let me know if you have found a copy of this document online.

Links in Gopher are characteristics applied to a directory. If you have 
ever used a "hosts" file on the WWW, it's a similar concept. Each Gopher 
link is created with a series of settings that are spelled out in a file 
called ".links" The contents of all Gopher directories are described in 
plaintext files like ".links" 

First, create the file by typing "edit .links". If you've run "mkgopher," 
there may already be a .links in your root Gopher directory.

Once you're editing, you'll need the following lines. For this example I 
will be linking to another user's Gopher site on SDF.

Path=/users/username/
Type=1
Name=username
Host=sdf.lonestar.org
Port=+

Path= sets the subdirectory you are linking to. Here "username" can be 
replaced wth any SDF user who has a Gopher site.

Type= sets the item type. Here's a list of types I grabbed from Wikipedia:

    * 0 = plain text file
    * 1 = directory listing
    * 2 = CSO search query
    * 3 = error message
    * 4 = BinHex encoded text file
    * 5 = binary archive file
    * 6 = UUEncoded text file
    * 7 = search engine query
    * 8 = telnet session pointer
    * 9 = binary file
    * d = PDF file
    * g = GIF image file
    * h = HTML file
    * i = informational message
    * I = image file
    * s = audio file

The Gopher article on Wikipedia, unfortunately, is not all that clear 
about how to implement the features it describes. Maybe that's part of its 
"neutral" directive.

Name= sets a brief description of the link. 

Host= hostname.

Port= port number on the server. + is the Gopher symbol for "default." 
Gopher's default port is 70.

If you think anything should be added to this document, please feel free 
to email me: 6 billion ghosts at g mail dot com.