Computing

Websites

These are a few of the other websites that I either own or maintain on the owner's behalf:

• minimopar.net - technical information about 80s and 90s turbo Mopars
• knizefamily.net - the original domain for this and other family-hosed sites
• sdac-chicago.org - Shelby-Dodge Automobile Club, Chicagoland chapter
• tubelab.com - vacuum tube amplifier designs and kits by George Anderson

Oppa BBS Style

Posted on March 25, 2026.

While messing around with different themes and fonts, I came accross a cache of PC text mode fonts at int10h.org.  It inspired a light re-theme of my initial, basic style for this site that is a nod towards the good old BBS days.  After some experimentation, I settled on this corrected EGA font.  I haven't seen EGA text in a long time; it really takes me back.

Not a Blog

Posted on March 09, 2026.

A few weeks ago, I started looking into what it would take to convert this WordPress-based site back into a static site using a static site generator.  My main motivation was to end the update treadmill, constant security threats, and the fire hose of comment spam (unless I also pay for Akismet, of course).  I post to my site in bursts and it can go years without any updates.  This does not mesh well with WordPress.  Although it can auto-update itself, the plugins need constant attention.  I've had two security incidents, one where I had to restore from backups.  Then there is the inevitable bit-rot that happens with abandoned plugins and my customized theme as major WordPress versions are released.  The site is in need of a re-theme, but I'd rather do it once and be done.

I looked at a few options (Jekyll, Hugo, Astro) and settled on Eleventy.  I liked its light weight, short list of dependencies, and the ability to control everything.  I used wordpress-export-to-markdown to import the content from an export XML.  It did some weird stuff to the front matter and downloaded images were scattered around, but the content was all there.  I wrote some scripts to perform bulk reorganization of the markdown and image files and set out to create layout templates to reconstruct the basic functionality that WordPress provided.  I dusted-off the old CSS theme from my original static site to use as a starting point.  I'll get more playful with the look later.  Overall, the initial import process was not that difficult.

I did still have to manually scrub every page and post to address formatting issues (floating images, image blocks, small galleries, etc) and broken internal links that were still pointing to things from the old static site.  I also found that some old content went missing at some point.  I tried to recover what I could from backups.  I employed Claude to help with some of the reformatting, once I established a pattern.  There were also hacks in the page content to work around WordPress limitations that I could now take care of directly in Eleventy (categories, subcategories, topics, etc).  11ty has proven to be a good fit for my needs, once I got my head around things like the data cascade and pagination.  It's pretty intuitive, once you "get" it.

WordPress was never the best CMS solution for my site.  I shoe-horned my old static site into it by slightly-abusing the page hierarchy and category systems.  It worked, but it was brittle.  I chose it mainly because the project appeared to have "staying power" and I found I was able to bend it to my needs with a custom theme.  I had hoped the built-in editor would reduce friction and induce more frequent updates from myself.  It probably did, but not to the extent I was expecting.  Markdown is much easier publish from than raw HTML, so it's still a step up from a pure, static website.

I would also like the site be more "surfable" on the olde Internet.  There are some signs of other creators wanting to break out of big tech's walled gardens and just make websites again.  What better way than with some old-skool HTML and CSS.  Webrings are apparently a thing again and Neocities somehow exists.

Still a Blog?

Posted on January 18, 2025.

Wow, so it's been almost a decade since I last posted here.  I've switched hosting situations multiple times in the intervening years and this site has suffered its fair share of bit-rot along the way.  I actually took it down at one point, as I assumed no one would notice.  It turns out there are a number of forums and whatnot that direct links to files in here, so I brought it back after receiving some frantic emails.  WordPress was hopelessly out of date and when I jumped to the latest release, it broke this ancient theme, a number of plugins, and there were also some problems with the DB due to its age (using a very old storage engine).  I thought all was lost, but somehow got it going again.  I'm sticking to my guns on this highly dated-looking theme and I absolutely hate the new WordPress editor, but I found this plugin called "Classic Editor" that has saved the day.

So yeah, why am I even posting on here when I know no one will ever read it? Mostly for my own posterity, I guess...and maybe the web crawlers will find these posts and show them on page 6 in their search results.  I've learned a valuable lesson over the past couple of decades: letting a few huge social media corporations hoover-up all of the discourse on the Internet and move them into their walled gardens has effectively ruined it.  A lot of the hobby-related discussions that had moved from email lists into Internet forums back in sepia-times have now moved into Facebook or Reddit.  Many of the forums still physically exist, but they're mostly cobwebs and crickets and/or a fire hose of spam with maybe a few gray beards lurking here or there.  Facebook Groups are a terrible replacement for something like a forum, as it's impossible to find anything and the same questions get asked over and over.  They have no reason to change it, as all they care about is engagement.  Alas, this is where we are now and I don't see it ever turning around.

I stopped using Twitter about 5 years ago, as my feed slowly morphed into an AI stream of consciousness.  I was never into micro-blogging, but I used it as an RSS feed of sorts for the topics and publishers I was interested in.  Since it was no longer capable of performing that function, I started playing around with things like Mastodon...even setting up my own instance.  It kind of did what I wanted, but like so many before it (Diaspora, GNU Social, etc) it didn't really work because no one was there generating content.  It's the age-old problem of adoption.  That all changed in 2022 and now I find Mastodon does pretty much what I want thanks to relays and folks just plain-old posting there.  I do have a Bluesky account and that place feels a lot like Twitter did back when it was useful.  But I think we know the inevitable result will be the same once the VC money runs out.  I've also been playing around with Pixelfed and, thanks to the train wreck over at Reddit, Lemmy.  Something to be a bit excited about, at the very least.

New Host (again)

Posted on August 12, 2015.

Things changed with our previous data center such that it is no longer a viable option.  Thanks again to iMav for hosting me previously.  It was great while it lasted.

I've moved everything again to my own virtual private server over at 1&1.  I'm done with shared virtual web hosting, as the database performance is horrid and the setup limitations are annoying (I need to host several sites).  So far, it has been working great....

New Hosting

Posted on January 10, 2013.

Thanks to the generosity of iMav at geekhack.org, I now have some real hosting for my sites.  So long, GoDaddy.

In other news, the new version of WordPress breaks an old plugin that I forgot I was using (PhotoJar).  I relied on its [image] shortcode quite heavily, so many of my embedded photos no longer show up.  I will probably have to write some PHP glue to restore old posts.