Thursday, November 04, 1999

Today's award for the best name goes to MrEdBlog.

Dan Gillmor: "Hong Kong reminds me of New York and San Francisco three or four years ago, when it was obvious the Net was going to change things and smart people began to figure out how they could get a piece of the action."

MacCentral: Server Scripting.

News.Com: Start-ups target real-life communities for Web page building. "Unlike the first wave of Web communities, these companies are not trying to garner advertising dollars by amassing home page publishers on their Web sites. Instead, this new breed seeks to become the invisible toolbox that bigger Web sites can rent to build the communities themselves."

A question for Apache gurus.

Moving day! We're switching www.scripting.com from WebSTAR on a Mac to Apache on Linux. Here's a test page. I wonder if this loads faster? (It does for me.) BTW, the Linux box is the Cobalt Qube. We love this machine, it's so cool, everyone should be issued one at birth.

I think the bandwith problem is resolved. We had stepped-down channel refreshing on My.UserLand in an attempt to keep our servers running. Paul Hardwick, editor of Privacy Digest helped us track down the problem. Now the next time a channel refreshes, the change will be reflected on the choose and viewChannel pages. If you don't understand what this means, don't worry, it's not on the final exam.

The next problem is figuring out why Wired and Red Herring aren't updating. Another day another dollar. Postscript: You won't believe the reason the Wired channel isn't working. And if you believe that, you won't believe the workaround. Stay tuned.

Theory: Our T1 line doesn't like sunshine?

According to the University of Wyoming, sunrise in San Francisco is at 6:36AM. As I write this it's 5:08AM. The net appears fast from my side of the pipe.

It's now 7:01AM, the sun is up, and the net is still snappy viewed thru my portal. Excellent!

8:51AM: I'm getting traceroutes from readers who are not getting thru again, pointing to problems inside the Conxion network. Just got a call from the ISP telling me, again, to look for problems with people connecting from the West Coast. Grrrrr.

10:41AM: According to the ISP, in routine maintenence last Thursday, PacBell downgraded our line from a T1 to less than ISDN throughput. At 4PM yesterday they gave us back our T1.

Last night's survey clearly does not support their belief that the problem is only on the West Coast of the US.

If you've been running a Frontier web server for more than a few months here's a tip that will improve performance, possibly by a lot.

It's possible that Salon is trying too hard.

Salon: "Last Tuesday, when I was first forwarded the URL by a co-worker, the site counter boasted 11,000 visitors."