Here at Blarg Industries, our R&D 3 team has just released GopherPress, the best-in-class WordPress plugin for serving your digital content over the Gopher protocol (RFC 1436). This is not a drill.
After 18 months of ideation, a comprehensive blue-sky sprint, and three separate paradigm pivots, we are proud to say the future of enterprise content delivery is here. The future is 1991.
Why Gopher, and Why Now
HTTP has had a good run. Honestly, a great run. But our proprietary research, compiled across multiple synergy sessions and at least one company retreat where someone had a whiteboard marker for way too long — reveals a consistent pattern across high-growth organizations: the web is bloated, CSS is out of control, and your users do not need a consent banner to read a blog post.
Gopher is different. Gopher is clean. A client sends a selector string. The server responds with a menu or a document. That’s it. No JavaScript bundles. No third-party tracking pixels. No seventeen cookie consent dialogs before the content loads. Just text, delivered at the speed of a motivated university student in 1991.
The digital transformation opportunity here is significant.
What GopherPress Does
GopherPress is a WordPress plugin that spins up a real, live Gopher server alongside your existing web infrastructure. Your content: posts, pages, categories, archives–all of it, available on port 7070 via the Gopher protocol, rendered in beautiful, mission-critical plain text.
Key differentiators include:
- ASCII art featured images powered by our proprietary aalib-derived rendering engine (we call this our Visual Content Normalization Layer, which is a thing we said out loud in a meeting)
- Figlet-rendered headings that honor the 70-column terminal width constraint your enterprise infrastructure has always deserved
- Intelligent text wrapping at a configurable column width, defaulting to 70 for maximum compatibility with legacy terminal environments, which is a real sentence we wrote in real documentation
- Fortune cookie quotes on the root menu, which our UX research team has determined drive measurable engagement velocity
- Easter eggs we can’t fully disclose due to ongoing IP considerations, but one of them is an ASCII gopher and it’s pretty good
For managed hosting environments where exec() is unavailable, GopherPress includes an HTTP-based Gopher emulation endpoint at /wp-json/gopherpress/v1/serve and a zero-dependency Node.js proxy you can run locally. We have called this our Hybrid Connectivity Matrix. We stand by that name.
What Industry Leaders Are Saying
“I invented the World Wide Web in 1989 so that humanity could share knowledge freely and openly. GopherPress is… an interesting interpretation of that vision.”
— Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web
“How did you get this number. Quit texting me!”
— Seth Rogen, Actor and Filmmaker
“As co-designer of TCP/IP, I have a deep appreciation for simple, well-specified application layer protocols. Gopher’s selector-based architecture is elegant. I’m not sure why someone built this as a WordPress plugin specifically, but I also can’t say I’m surprised someone built this as a WordPress plugin.”
— Vint Cerf, Co-inventor of TCP/IP, VP at Google
“DEVELOPERS. DEVELOPERS. DEVELOPERS. DEVELOPERS.”
— Steve Ballmer, Former CEO, Microsoft
“You know what I think about when I think about Gopher? I think — and bear with me here, because this is important — I think we had something. In 1993. Something real. Something… textual. And then. We. Lost it. GopherPress is… well. It’s something. It’s definitely that.”
— Jeff Goldblum (unsolicited voicemail, full transcript available in the Enterprise whitepaper)
Your Migration Path
We get it. You have a web presence. You have years of HTTP-based technical debt, a CDN contract you’re locked into until 2027, and a design system someone spent eight months on. We’re not saying throw all of that away.
We’re just saying: add Gopher.
The migration approach we recommend to our enterprise customers — what our solutions architecture team calls a Gopher-Adjacent Hybrid Posture — goes like this:
- Install GopherPress on your existing WordPress instance (takes about 45 seconds)
- Click Start on the admin page (there is a gopher animation, it’s free)
- Tell people your site is on Gopher now
- Watch the metrics (metrics not included)
Some clients ask about decommissioning their web presence entirely and going Gopher-only. That’s a longer conversation and honestly requires a discovery call.
Choose your level
Pricing
Free / Open Source
GopherPress is open source under GPL-2.0 and available on GitHub. Full functionality included: the daemon, the REST endpoint, the ASCII art pipeline, all the easter eggs. Forever free. This is just the plugin doing what WordPress plugins do.
0§
GopherPress Pro
For teams that need more. Includes:
* Priority email support (response within 72 hours, or 24 hours if you send it via Gopher)
* Access to the private Slack community (#gopher-protocol has some genuinely good stuff in it TBH)
* Early access to upcoming features, including GopherPress Analytics (we’re calling it “GopherStats”), additional admin terminal color themes (it’s already green on black, but some people want options), and experimental WAIS integration that we will probably never ship
49§
Month
GopherPress Enterprise SaaS
For organizations operating Gopher infrastructure at scale. Everything in Pro, plus:
* Dedicated GopherPress instance on our managed infrastructure (hosted on servers that definitely exist)
99.9% uptime SLA (Gopher is stateless, this is genuinely pretty easy to do)
* Custom port allocation from 70 to 7070, your choice
* Quarterly Business Reviews where we walk you through your Gopher traffic (it will be low; we will be honest about that in the QBR, we think that’s important)
* White-glove onboarding with a certified GopherPress Solutions Architect (that’s me, I just got certified this morning)
* SSO integration supporting SAML, OAuth 2.0, and Gopher+ authentication (Gopher+ authentication is real, mostly)
* A printed certificate suitable for framing confirming your organization is officially Gopher-Ready™
Pricing scales with selector volume, number of WordPress instances, and whether you want the certificate in color or grayscale. Color is $200/month more.
999§
Month
Get Started
If you’re ready to position your organization at the vanguard of retro-forward content delivery infrastructure, we’d love to connect.
→ Watch the Webinar Recording: “GopherPress — From PoC to Production in 45 Seconds”
Or just install the plugin. It’s free. The GitHub link is in the footer.
GopherPress is a product of Blarg Industries R&D 3. Blarg Industries is not responsible for any loss of HTTP traffic, confused users, or legacy Gopher clients that surface content you forgot you published in 2009. Gopher+ authentication support is real if you squint. The Gopher-Ready™ certificate is absolutely real if you pay for it.
Leave a Reply