Kroovy's Phlog
# Thoughts on the Gopher Onion Initiative
I don't want to repeat the prudential words that are already written
down at bitreich.org:
DIR The Gopher Onion Initiative
...so, in a nutshell:
Onion services are indeed the obvious choice to go for, in order to host
a gopherhole (and visit them!).
## Broken usability
My daily gopher workflow looks like this:
Typing the word "sacc" into the commandline and adding a memorizable
domain name right behind it.
Press "Enter".
Fine.
There is my page.
But how can this work with onion addresses? They are long to type and
far beyond from being easy to memorize. The length will extend even more
of the torproject switches to an address length of 54 characters, as
tthey plan.
## Fixing usability
There is a solution.
Everybody should use tools like eschalot to mine themselves an onion
address. That way, at least the beginning of an address is memorizable.
For example, if you would like to visit my gopherhole, you would use
"kroovybwbzaagcen.onion".
Once that is achieved, we can use the tab completion of our shell to do
the nasty part of the onion address. I already hacked an example using
bash. It utilizes the compgen command in combination with a simple
bookmark-file that contains all of the onion addresses you visit (one
address per line).
You can check out the code that has to be added to your .bashrc here:
DIR code
And also check out eschalot, which enables you to mine your own address:
HTML eschalot - onion address miner
You can check out my asciinema recording. It displays the tab completion
workflow very well:
HTML my asciinema recording
~
/~
\ \ /**
\ ////
// //
// //
///&//
/ & /\ \
/ & .,, \
/& % : \
/& % : ; `\
/&' &..% !.. `.\
/&' : &''" ! ``. : `.\
/#' % : "" * . : : `.\
I# :& : !" * `. : :: I
I &% : : !%.` '. . : : : I
I && :%: .&. . . : : : I
I %&&&%%: WW. .%. : : I
\&&&##%%%`W! & ' : ,'/
\####ITO%% W &..' #,'/
\W&&##%%&&&&### %./
\###j[\##//##}/
++///~~\//_
\\ \ \ \ \_
/ / \ (Berrito)