[ANN] GemIF - Simple Interactive Fiction engine for Gemini

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great John Cowan once stated:
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 4:28 PM Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote:
> 
>   Define "state change", because this link on my server:
> >
> >         gemini://gemini.conman.org/qotd
> >
> > literally makes a state change on every request (it pulls up the next
> > quote, and it tracks the number across restarts).
> 
> I'm with Sean here.  There are a large number of very simple services that
> Gemini systems could easily provide that would be banned under an
> idempotent-only rule.  Historically, quote-of-the-day could be gotten from
> a server by connecting on port 17 with either TCP or UDP; see the
> /etc/services file and RFC 865.  (Sean, you might want to support port 17
> just for hack value; if anybody connects to it, forget TLS: just blast back
> the first 512 bytes of the next quote and close the connection.)

  Did you try it?  Because I do run a QOTD server on port TCP port 17.  In
fact, the Gemini link gets the quote from my QOTD server (and the same with
my gopher server, only the quote is on the main page).  I don't quite follow
the RFC (it will send a quote longer than 512 bytes) but hey, this is 2020,
not 1983.

  I used to support QOTD via UDP until I found out it was used in
amplification attacks and had to drop UDP support (this is why we can't have
nice things on the Internet).

  -spc (We now resume our regularly scheduled bikeshedding, currently in
	progress ... )