as of right now, it appears that justinsomnia.org is resolving to the IP address of my cable modem which is then forwarded to my webserver. i decided to buy the domain from godaddy ($8.95/year) and point the record to zoneedit’s free-ish nameservers. took about 24 hours to become operational. starting to think i might want to shell out another $9/year to “hide” the plethora of personal information available via whois.
i haven’t set up the dynamic dns “client” yet. i’m kind of wishing my cable modem+router+wireless access point (which i thought was the epitome of gadgetry consolidation) had some of the neat advanced features of linksys’s standalone wireless router (like built-in ddns)–but it doesn’t
i’m also kind of wishing roadrunner had an option for me to get a static IP address. if i was an ISP, i’d be techie friendly and offer an a la carte menu of individually priced options like:
IMAP/POP email accounts (branded gmail accounts?)
static IP(s)
personal webspace with access to PHP, MySQL
domain name registration and nameservers
synchronous data transfer
i wonder though how much of the $41.95 i pay roadrunner each month actually goes to time warner cable? i’m assuming most of it, because earthlink and max.inter.net don’t have any price advantage. maybe i should write an ISP business plan.
as far as what i’m going to do with the server… i’m thinking about moving my blog off unc (now that i can’t claim first amendment academic rights or anything) and onto justinsomnia.org. i’d also like to do the same with my photo gallery. of course this might be a crappy idea especially if my uptime is marginally less than 99.999%. we’ll see.
nolan suggested debian. the feeling i got from debian was that it would be hard. i felt the pull of redhat. but i was unfamiliar with all the fedora core stuff. and i didn’t want a froo-froo end user system. i wanted to build a server. so i read through the installation document to refresh my memory and decided to go for it.
assembly
last wednesday i ordered the parts. monday they arrived and later that night jane and i roughly assembled them. i discovered later that i had to replace a heat sink under the cdrom drive in order to get the case back together. last night i popped in the debian cd (woody-i386-1.iso) i had burned and let it rip. the installation went smoother than i expected. took about an hour, then i got apache, mysql, and php installed and fiddled with the hardware to get the case together properly. which took a few more hours.
under the hoodfinished product
update: as of 8/26/04, the IP address is 24.211.162.54 update: as of 2/1/05, the IP address is 24.163.64.42
update: the domain name justinsomnia.org now points to the IP address above.
i was thinking today that i wish i could remember how long i’ve been hitting the trails off of estes.
then just now i happened to be adding titles to some of my old posts and stumbled upon a dated description of my second mountain biking venture.
the serendipity is worth noting. had i not been doing substantial blog maintenance, i would never have thought that my blog contained that information (or went back that far).
i’ve wagered that google does the same thing to the body of all (or most) information. before google, most people would have never thought to look up something trivial or esoteric. the cost would have exceeded the benefit. now a whole culture exists around seeking out that esoterica.
what my blog is missing is a search box. it acts as backup memory, yes, but it’s like a black box without a retrieval interface. then again, google owns blogger. i doubt i’ll have to wait long.
then i decided to take the larger plunge and absorb my homepage into my blog which meant turning certain homepage content areas (about, wishlist, food and drink, etc) into actual post-dated “posts”.
suddenly it was 4am!
update: the title of the post was a hint. if the page looks funny, it might be because your browser is using a cached stylesheet with the new layout. hold down the “shift” key and press “reload” to clear the cache and reload the page.
i’ve just republished my entire blog with blogger’s new “page per post” feature turned on. click “permalink” in the lower-right to see what i mean.
this is good because now you can link to a single post! but is bad because it changes all my old permalinks–breaking my own links to my posts and anyone else’s links to my posts. number of posts with old links to other posts: ~15.
luckily all the old links have the word “archive.html” in them. of course so do links to other people’s blogger archives.
fixed. (30 minutes later)
crap. since “page per post” files the individual post pages under directories for the year and the month, all the relative URLs to my images are broken. err. (this is why perl exists.) 42 posts to fix.
