I still love reading my own stuff in the blogroll. Learning how to make stuff look good in a tiny little format like that. I don't mind having a small space to deploy in, but I like to have lots of room where I write. Linkblogs and blogrolls go together really well. Blogrolls work best for smaller groups of people and projects, not the huge number of followers people have on the twitter-like social web. But I think even a few hundred items in a blogroll work, as long as it's dynamic, and it's reverse chronologic. #
Never thought I'd be so glad to see the xml-rpc site back up and running. I found out about it being off by someone sending an email asking if they could buy the domain from me. Otherwise I'm not sure I would have noticed. The whole idea is to put these static sites in a safe place and forget about it. But clearly there are no safe places and someday you might get dragged back to try to debug some work you did a bunch of years ago. #
Braintrust query: I have not been able to reliably get to a bunch of my sites that use HTTP this morning. For example, feeder.scripting.com, a site that I use to test feeds. Also xmlrpc.com. It's possible that something broke overnight in my server. Or Digital Ocean is having a problem? Doesn't seem like it's something Google is doing to punish me for using HTTP, though that is always the first thing that comes to mind. I tried moving the XML-RPC site to a different server, but the problem follows it. No changes have been made to the site in years. Not exactly what I had planned to be digging into on a nice (but cold) Sunday morning in the mountains. I started a thread, if you have any insights. At least scripting.com is still working, but it's not served through my software or Digital Ocean. #
So I went ahead and moved xmlrpc.com to a HTTPS server. The other day I forgot to mention that style sheets might not be readable when you move from HTTP to HTTPS, leading to this striking breakage I saw when I first got to look at the site in its new location. And now thanks to Google and the EFF, I get to spend time debugging something that worked just fine in 1998 and every year since then. Should I send them the bill for my time? Fuckers. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)