Web

I learned–perhaps finally understood–how apache and let's encrypt work. I had a long-standing issue with certificate renewals and I hope that the auto-renewals will work now that I have solved how apache works on my server.

Turns out that when you hack shit together, it tends to be… hacky. I hope that my knowledge will continue to grow and the lessons (re)learned today will be easily recalled if I find myself with a broken install for my various websites on my server here.

I have links to share and I need to make time to share them with you, whoever you are. I hope that they are at the very least insightful.

Everyone who's worked in support can relate to the headline alone on this article. I've also seen this a lot on the other side of support, with the service provider blaming the hardware and the hardware support blaming the service provider. And if it's the same organization, it's the same thing, only with different departments.

There's a meteor shower tonight and although this article is a bit old, it's always going to be relevant. Light pollution is a big detriment to nature and ourselves. I love electric lights, do they all need to be on all the time though?

I've had conversations before about liking the art and disliking the artist and most of the time I am quite capable of separating the two. This article specifically relates to the author of “Master and Commander”. I wonder if every famous person is (not so) secretly a terrible person and if this is a by-product of our obsession with fame.

And finally this post from the Oatmeal is epic. If you read nothing else, read this last one.

I have to restore entries from a backup that is not entirely reliable in the date/time that the entries were posted. The good news is that I have a backup.

I have posts in the pipeline, I need to make time to polish and publish them. Stay tuned to this channel.

I had an inkling that this might be the case. I often think about how much we were able to do with limitations in thechnology. We don't (usually) program write software in machine code anymore and I wonder how much faster apps would be if we did. Of course there are drawbacks. Hardware architecture changes very fast and coding in high level languages affords us portability with our code, much like what the language Java promised us in the 90's.

It turns out that if you let it, some sites will download over 512MB of content due to how the advertising platform works. The site in question seems to think that using RSS will resolve this issue (it will) instead of fixing the web page to be more efficient (which the author of the original article pointed out). I first saw this post on Shubham Bose's website via HackerNews that depicts the 49MB website. The comments on HackerNews are good insight and Shubham points out that Windows 95 consumed less space than the post from NYT. As with the post about PC Gamer, NYT's page bloat is mostly due to ads. I hate ads and will block ad networks on my personal network. Browsing the web on another network is a real treat. I have maintained to myself when I see a pop-up asking me to disable my ad blocker taht I would not use one, if I could trust as servers. In the not too recent past I came to distrust second party ad platforms because Doubleclick was hijacked and malware was installed via banner ads. Lovely. Since then I've been wary.

There is discussion about ad blocking equating piracy and there is real merit to that argument. For my part, I usually do what I do when I'm hit with a paywall, I bounce from the site. I have a hope that some data nerd somewhere sees that I left as soon as I was asked to disable my ad blocker and brings that to someone who can make a decision about how ads are being served. I recognize that not all publishers can afford to have a department that manages their ad content and the tech skills required to keep that functional. I understand that decentralization is easier to work with, letting a dedicated external team handle the ads. That's another post for another time though. I pine for an Internet that feels more personal and less driven by capitalism.