The article says there are just over a hundred gopher sites in existence. Yay - mine is one of them! I've got 200 or so articles on my website and one day I decided to make them all available as well over gopher. It's easy to do: install pygopherd on your machine for the server, and run your HTML files through an emacs macro that strips the HTML and outputs 80 column text, and you're in business!

It feels whimsical to have a gopher site up and running, but it costs me nothing and earns me nothing. It's there because I like it and because I feel happy knowing it's there. In a way, that's the sentiment behind the Internet in its earliest days. And that's what i like about it - the philosophical purity of doing something for its own sake. And now, for the simple pleasure of posting a link with that old protocol:

gopher://therandymon.com

How awesome does that look? :)

Not sure how you'd visit gopher sites in Windows. Add the Overbite Firefox plugin available at Floodgap, I suppose. On Unix/Linux "forg" is really nice on the GUI side, and lynx is your best bet at the CLI. Although you'll find the original gopher client in a lot of repos too - all derivatives of Debian/Ubuntu and FreeBSD, at least.