8.2  BURROWING DEEPER


As fascinating as it can be to explore "gopherspace," you might one day 
want to quickly retrieve some information or a file.  Or you might grow 
tired of calling up endless menus to get to the one you want. 
Fortunately,  there are ways to make even gophers easier to use. 

One is with archie's friend, veronica (it allegedly is an acronym, but 
don't believe that for a second), who does for gopherspace what archie 
does for ftp sites. 

In most gophers, you'll find veronica by selecting "Other gopher and 
information services" at the main menu and then "Searching through 
gopherspace using veronica."  Select this and you'll get something like 
this: 

                    Internet Gopher Information Client v1.1

                  Search titles in Gopherspace using veronica

 -->  1.                                                             .
      2.  FAQ:  Frequently-Asked Questions about veronica  (1993/08/23).
      3.  How to compose  veronica queries (NEW June 24) READ ME!!.
      4.  Search Gopher Directory Titles at PSINet 
      5.  Search Gopher Directory Titles at SUNET 
      6.  Search Gopher Directory Titles at U. of Manitoba 
      7.  Search Gopher Directory Titles at University of Cologne 
      8.  Search gopherspace at PSINet 
      9.  Search gopherspace at SUNET 
      10. Search gopherspace at U. of Manitoba 
      11. Search gopherspace at University of Cologne 


Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu                        Page: 1/1

A few choices there!  First, the difference between searching directory 
titles and just plain ol' gopherspace.  If you already know the sort of 
directory you're looking for (say a directory containing MS-DOS 
programs), do a directory-title search.  But if you're not sure what kind 
of directory your information might be in, then do a general gopherspace 
search. In general, it doesn't matter which of the particular veronicas 
you use -- they should all be able to produce the same results.  The 
reason there is more than one is because the Internet has become so 
popular that only one veronica (or one gopher or one of almost anything) 
would quickly be overwhelmed by all the information requests from around 
the world.  

You can use veronica to search for almost anything.  Want to find museums 
that might have online displays from their exhibits?  Try searching for 
"museum."  Looking for a copy of the Declaration of Independence?  Try 
"declaration." 

In many cases, your search will bring up a new gopher menu of choices to 
try. 

Say you want to impress those guests coming over for dinner on Friday by 
cooking cherries flambe. If you were to call up veronica and type in 
"flambe" after calling up veronica, you would soon get a menu listing 
several flambe recipes, including one called "dessert flambe."  Put your 
cursor on that line of the menu and hit enter, and you'll find it's a 
menu for cherries flambe.  Then hit your q key to quit, and gopher will 
ask you if you want to save the file in your home directory on your 
public-access site or whether you want to e-mail it somewhere. 

As you can see, you can use veronica as an alternative to archie, which, 
because of the Internet's growing popularity, seems to take longer and 
longer to work. 

In addition to archie and veronica, we now also have jugheads (no bettys 
yet, though).  These work the same as veronicas, but their searches are 
limited to the specific gopher systems on which they reside. 

If there are particular gopher resources you use frequently, there are a 
couple of ways to get to them even more directly. 

One is to use gopher in a manner similar to the way you can use telnet. 
If you know a particular gopher's Internet address (often the same as its 
telnet or ftp address), you can connect to it directly, rather than going 
through menus.  For example, say you want to use the gopher at 
info.umd.edu.  If your public-access site has a gopher system installed, 
type this 
           
     gopher info.umd.edu

at your command prompt and you'll be connected.
     
But even that can get tedious if there are several gophers you use 
frequently. That's where bookmarks come in.  Gophers let you create a 
list of your favorite gopher sites and even database queries.  Then, 
instead of digging ever deeper into the gopher directory structure, you 
just call up your bookmark list and select the service you want. 

To create a bookmark for a particular gopher site, first call up gopher.  
Then go through all the gopher menus until you get to the menu you want.  
Type a capital A. You'll be given a suggested name for the bookmark enty, 
which you can change if you want by backspacing over the suggestion and 
typing in your own.  When done, hit enter.  Now, whenever you're in 
gopherspace and want to zip back to that particular gopher service, just 
hit your V key (upper- or lower-case; in this instance, gopher doesn't 
care) anywhere within gopher.  This will bring up a list of your 
bookmarks. Move to the one you want and hit enter, and you'll be 
connected. 

Using a capital A is also good for saving particular database or veronica 
queries that you use frequently (for example, searching for news stories 
on a particular topic if your public-access site maintains an indexed 
archive of wire-service news). 

Instead of a capital A, you can also hit a lower-case a.  This will bring 
you to the particular line within a menu, rather than show you the entire 
menu.  

If you ever want to delete a bookmark, hit V within gopher, select the 
item you want to get rid of, and then hit your D key. 

One more hint: 

If you want to find the address of a particular gopher service, hit your 
= key after you've highlighted its entry in a gopher menu.  You'll get 
back a couple of lines, most of which will be technicalese of no 
immediate value to most folks, but some of which will consist of the 
site's address.