Category: About This Site

I’ve gradually been leaning towards two opinions:

1: Having the Digest load as fast as possible is a benefit for everyone, and

2: I want to get off the PHP/Wordpress vulnerability merry-go-round.

Does anyone have specific experience with static site generators?  Ideally there’s something out there as polished/unfiddly as WordPress, but I don’t know what.  The Digest started using the Movable Type product, and I’m tempted to return.

Update: People have been recommending Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll.  It looks like comments would end up going into Disqus, which is an external not-under-my-control application.  There are other plugins for comments, but none of them as straightforward.  What are people’s thoughts on using an outside service?

The insulation on the external lines leading here are apparently delicious, if you’re a squirrel.

I’m moved over to new hardware for the Digest.  Tell me if you see issues, please.

shiningsilence.com/dragonflydigest.com will be going down for a brief period in the next 24 hours, for a hardware upgrade.

The machine this site runs on just had a fan die, so somewhere in the next 24 hours, I’m going to be installing a new fan, and a new hard drive while I’m at it.  Expect a few hours of downtime as I rebuild both hardware and software.

Quiet for you, the reader, at least.  My schedule is irregular because of work over the next few days – including the weekend – so regular posting may not resume until next week.  Sorry!

For some reason, OpenSSL-using command line clients – but not any browsers – are choking on the RSS feed for this site when fetched via https.  So, the site no longer defaults to https.  It’s still available if you want to use it, and I’ll work on fixing the setup.

The way to see it is:

openssl s_client -connect www.dragonflydigest.com:443

You will notice an error in the output like this:

672060044:error:140790E5:SSL routines:SSL23_WRITE:ssl handshake failure:/usr/src/secure/lib/libssl/../../../crypto/openssl/ssl/s23_lib.c:184:

There’s lots of references to errors like this out there – many different, some for bugs long fixed.  I daresay it’s a configuration screwup I haven’t figured out yet; I’ve noticed that adding -tls1 or -no_tls1 or -ssl2 or -ssl3 to the above command makes the problem go away.

 

Since the switch to https here, the RSS feed has been having trouble, as several people reported.  I haven’t had time to look into it much so far.  Though I suppose it’s only likely that you are reading this if you are unaffected by it.

I had a reminder in my calendar to do it tonight, and thanks to your suggestions, I have a ‘real’ SSL certificate installed.  If you want to browse the Digest using https, go for it.

I need to get a legit certificate for this domain.  I’ve never done serious https cert shopping – who has, and what’s your opinion of the vendors?  (“Not Network Solutions” I can already guess).

The Digest is now located at dragonflydigest.com (or dragonflybsddigest.com if you are really into typing).  Everything else should be generally the same, and old links still work.  I’m only 8 or 9 years late in getting a real domain name attached…

I ended up with this server rebooting as we were affected by Time Warner’s giant outage.  In the process of rebooting, I found I must have done an upgrade and forgotten to reboot to make sure everything still worked, as mod_php had disappeared and mysql decided it didn’t want to work.  Things appear to be OK now…

The plugin I use for posting to Twitter managed to silently stop working after a recent WordPress upgrade.   It’s fixed now.  Thanks to alert reader TJ for telling me.  If you are picking up articles here through Twitter, you have some backlog waiting for you.

This site, shiningsilence.com, is now available on IPv6.  Thanks to Markus Müller for getting me to actually complete the process.

I knocked my own server out of commission today – sorry!  I thought it was because I was experimenting with an IPv6 tunnel – but no.  It appears to be a long-running Minecraft server.  Once that was gone, it all got better.

shiningsilence.com suffered a disk failure early this morning.  I’ll take the opportunity to set up a new machine, given that my local backup drive hasn’t been mounted and my remote backup went offline, in a horrible coincidence.

The disk is up and limping, which is why you can read this, but I’m still rebuilding.  What motherboard/CPU/RAID/etc. parts do people recommend?