bartleby

"I would prefer not to."

A scrivener for gopherspace. Bartleby walks a directory, reads sidecar .bcard metadata, and writes a gopher menu tree under catalog/. Not a blog engine. Not Jekyll for gopher. Your gopherhole is a library, not a website, and bartleby is a librarian, not a web developer.

catalog/ is the only thing bartleby writes. The source tree is read-only — delete catalog/ and your library is exactly as you wrote it.

Status: MVP under development.

What it does

Given a library directory:

my-library/
  bartleby.conf
  recipes.bcard            # optional metadata for recipes/
  recipes/
    cheesecake.jpg
    cheesecake.jpg.bcard   # optional metadata for cheesecake.jpg
    march-rain.txt.bcard
    march-rain.txt
  poetry/
    ...

bartleby emits catalog/ alongside it:

my-library/
  catalog/                  # everything bartleby generates lives here
    .gophermap              # the root card catalog
    feed.xml                # atom feed of the whole library
    recipes/
      .gophermap
      feed.xml
    poetry/
      .gophermap
      feed.xml

Point a gopher daemon at the library; share gopher://host:port/1/<selector>/catalog/ as the entry URL.

Reference

Classifications vs works

Every directory in your library is either a classification (a subject grouping bartleby recurses into) or a work (an opaque "directory-as-book" treated as a single catalog entry). The default is classification. A directory becomes a work when you place a sibling .bcard next to it:

• recipes/ alone → classification.
• recipes/ with a sibling recipes.bcard → work.

A file directly inside a classification is cataloged as its own work. Files and directories inside a work-directory are not separately cataloged — they are part of the work. Readers reach them via the gopher daemon's natural directory listing once they click into the work.

To give a classification custom metadata (title, description) without promoting it to a work, put classification: true in the bcard:

# recipes.bcard — classification metadata for recipes/
title: Recipes
description: Things with flour and heat.
classification: true

.bcard — sidecar metadata

YAML. Place next to the file or directory it describes, sharing the name: cheesecake.jpg.bcard describes cheesecake.jpg; snickerdoodles.bcard describes snickerdoodles/.

title: Snickerdoodles
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-21
description: My grandmother's recipe.
classification: false

Every field is optional. Defaults: title → filename or directory name (verbatim); created → file mtime; updated → created; description → first paragraph of the file for text works, empty otherwise; classification → false.

bartleby.conf — library configuration

YAML, one per library, at the library root:

hostname: gopher.someodd.zip
port: 70
selector: /library
recent_count: 10
feed_count: 50
text_preview_bytes: 4096
gophermap_filename: .gophermap   # set to "gophermap" for gophernicus/Pituophis/Bucktooth
item_types:                      # extend or override the default extension → gopher-type map
  .wad:  "9"
  .epub: "9"
  .nfo:  "0"

Only hostname is required. Everything else has the defaults shown. The library's own title is the basename of the library directory — the root is not metadata-special.

For deeper detail (warnings, UTF-8 semantics, catalog layout, atom feed structure), see bartleby-plan.md.

Usage

bartleby /path/to/library

Build from source

Requires Stack.

stack build
stack test
stack install

First build pulls in Venusia (the gopher library that handles menu formatting), pinned to a specific commit in stack.yaml.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.