Websnob > How to Finger Through a Web Page > Gateways

Finger Gateways

In the long run, using gateways of any sort can be tricky, since gateways often change or disappear without much notice; using gateway URLs to provide a link to your .plan file could suddenly and spectacularly fail without much warning.

In fact, I suspect gateways in general are a dying breed. (The ones listed here are certainly dying off quickly enough.) As the number of web readers increases, being the exclusive provider of any service will put increasingly larger loads on poor defenseless web servers. If mega-servers like Yahoo! can time out because of overload, a lone gateway CGI on an .edu server is doomed. So, strictly on practical merits, I suggest you chose a Finger CGI whenever you can, and leave the gateways for people who don't have CGI capabilities.

(The paragraph above was written in 1996, and turned out to be completely wrong. A suprising number of these gateways are still hanging on strong. Yahoo still falls down once in a while, though.)

If you know any finger gateways not listed below, feel free to tell me about them.

Brett's Web to Finger Gateway (DEFUNCT)

Contact: Brett Rickman <brettr@rickman> of Rickman Information Services, an Internet consulting firm.
Interactive URL: http://www.rickman.com/finger.html
Fixed URL: Not Applicable. (This is a POST-based gateway; extra parameters can't be added to the URL like most (GET-based) gateways.)
Preserves Whitespace? No. Doesn't even preserve line breaks!
Renders HTML? Yes, put not perfectly.
Escapes Entities? No.
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: The output includes an advertisement for Rickman Information Services.

Doug's WWW Finger Gateway (DEFUNCT)

Contact: Doug Stevenson <doug+@osu.edu>
Interactive URL: http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/finger.pl
Fixed URL: http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/finger.pl?dest=kibo@world.std.com
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? No.
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: In an especially nice touch, the script could output its own source, meaning anyone installing the gateway becomes a distributor of the code. Software that enforces its own GPL license!

eArtmart Finger Gateway (DEFUNCT)

Contact: eArt International <eart_info@eart.com>, a intranet consulting firm dedicated to "international art market".
Interactive URL: http://wwwcgi.eart.com/cgi-bin/finger
Fixed URL: http://wwwcgi.eart.com/cgi-bin/finger/?kibo@world.std.com
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities?
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: Used ISINDEX for input. Appears to have disappeared along with the rest of eart.com.

FingerGate

Contact: John Van Essen <jve@gamers.org>
Interactive URL: http://www.gamers.org/cgi/FingerGate
Fixed URL: http://www.gamers.org/cgi/FingerGate?addr=kibo@world.std.com
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? Yes.
Escapes Entities? Yes.
Verbose Output? Yes.
Other Comments: Selectable options allow the user to choose between short, long, plan-only, and default responses. Another set of choices control the formatting of the response ranging from Content-type: text/plain (which allows you to save the finger response as-is) all the way to rendering it as pure html (usually the plan-only portion). There are canned examples available on the interactive form.

Hyperfinger (DEFUNCT)

Contact: Otis Gospodnetic <Otis.Gospodnetic@middlebury.edu>
Interactive URL: http://www.middlebury.edu/~otisg/HyperFinger.cgi
Fixed URL: http://www.middlebury.edu/~otisg/cgi/HyperFinger.cgi?user=kibo@world.std.com
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? Unknown (gateway died before I checked!)
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: None.

InterLink WWW Finger gateway (DEFUNCT)

Contact: InterLink -- I'm not sure what InterLink was because their homepage was in Norweigan, but the gateway was all-English.
Interactive URL:http://www.interlink.no/finger
Fixed URL: http://www.interlink.no/finger?kibo@world.std.com
Preserves Whitespace? No.
Renders HTML?
Escapes Entities?
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: Maintained some simple statistics of gateway use.

The MIT Finger Gateway

Contact: An anonymous webmaster <webmaster@mit.edu> at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Interactive URL: Special -- http://www.mit.edu:8001/finger is a valid URL, but the script will automatically finger the host making the httpd request.
Fixed URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/finger?kibo@world.std.com
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? Yes.
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: A ISINDEX-using gateway. This is one of the older finger gateways on the web, and used to suffer from problems with high server load/slow connections timeouts, but the situation seems much improved as of Fall 1996.

Russell's Finger Gateway (DEFUNCT)

Contact: I would assume it's Russell, but I can't find him.
Interactive URL: http://rdixon.ocs.lsumc.edu/!finginit
Fixed URL: Unknown
Preserves Whitespace? Unknown.
Renders HTML? Unknown.
Escapes Entities? Unknown.
Verbose Output? Unknown.
Other Comments: The problem isn't the gateway per se, but the domain name; my browser repeatedly times out or announces it can't find the server. That's strange. It's not often that a member of the .edu domain disappears. What did they do, close the school?

VanHeynigen's WWW-Finger Gateway with Faces

Contact: Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@moose.ca.indiana.edu>
Interactive URL: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/finger/gateway
Fixed URL: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/finger/world.std.com/kibo/w
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No, but properly wrappered URL will be converted to hyperlinks.
Escapes Entities? Yes.
Verbose Output? User configurable (the /w at the end of the Fixed is for verbose output).
Other Comments: Limited graphics via picon support.

The Xochipilli Finger Gateway

Contact: xochi@xochipilli.com
Interactive URL: http://xochipilli.com/finger.html
Fixed URL:
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? No.
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: The operators of this gateway are the first ones to ever e-mail me about these reviews, by the way. Friendly people.