I was checking on how much bandwidth I used last month on my other site, and I noticed a spike this month already. A glance at the logs tells me that I got posted to Slashdot again. Last time it was about my fooling around with putting Linux on a spare cash register I grabbed from my mom's store. This time, it was an archived copy of the Gopher Manifesto I dumpster-dived from the Google cache of a dead web site at my brother Trey's urging.

Apparently, the news is that someone implemented the gopher protocol in Apache version 2 and the guy who wrote the Perl module linked to my site.

Ok, sure. I used to be quite the fan gopher of gopher (it was the best way to get geological information way back when I had a text-only SLIP connection to the Internet). I guess I looked back on gopher fondly enough to archive the Manifesto, and I did have a gopher server running for a while out of curiosity, but I'm not altogether certain why this is news. The Web has pretty much taken over and there just isn't much room for gopher anymore. I guess some people might need a modern-ish gopher server for something -- like maybe migrating old gopher-only content in alongside a regular web site layout. You'd get to use all the normal web production systems, and serve gopher and HTTP traffic. That's cool, I guess.

BTW, I now have enough first-hand evidence that I can safely say there's nothing like plain, static web pages for surviving a sharp spike in requests. My server was fine both times.