02 Oct 2005
Stumbled across someone called Rose Fu’s portfolio site today, and was suitably impressed by the design. Markup isn’t quite perfect, but it’s just good to see people achieving this kind of thing with CSS-based design. (Read “this kind of thing”: conventionally very sliced-and-diced table-design).
Also of interest was her very Post Secret-esque project, Unsent Letters. Sure, a lot of it is as bad as angsty Fan Fiction, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless. I’ve only looked at it for a few moments, but it seems to be generally much worse than Post Secret is (in terms of the angsty teenager thing). The submission instructions say you don’t have to be concise, and I think that might have been its demise — part of Post Secret’s beauty is it’s such a concise medium (sure, it’s visual), and allows some degree of obfuscation whilst still sharing experience or thought. But hey, it’s a different tool, and it’s possibly helpful for people to write to… I just think the fact that it’s published is somewhat self-defeating, because the whole thing really doesn’t seem as though it’s meant to be read. Which I suppose fits with the whole Unsent Letter thing, but it’s not really as though it need be published, either. Shrug. Reach Out! has a similar facility, that simply destroys what you submit. Conversly, I think that seems very futile…
I think Post Secret hits a nice middle ground, that’s concise (hence accessible) and creative (hence cathartic). Anyway… a post about a nice website transformed itself, weird.
02 Oct 2005
Oh dear. I stumbled across this web address in today’s Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.nohsc.gov.au/
It’s actually the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission’s (NOHSC) website, but that in itself makes the link even clearer: The HSC poses an occupational health and safety risk, as is evident even in the URL of this organisation!
01 Oct 2005
For that photo website at that elusive domain name.
- Time from the idea to a site live:
- Six hours
- Time from a live site to a functional site:
- About a day
- Lines of code to make it go (markup, CSS, PHP):
- 2001
- Number of unique visitors:
- 309
- Average number of visitors per day:
- 85
- Visitors downloaded:
- 325MB/day, or 2.95GB
- Overall transfers:
- 3.21GB
- Number of albums:
- 26
- Number of (known) contributors:
- 10
- Number of photos:
- (Probably well) over 1200 (hard to count, because of source and thumbnails being stored as they are)
- Total size of site:
- 498MB
- Total size of photos:
- 345MB (overhead is mostly in upload archives I haven’t deleted yet)
- Shell scripts rewritten to do little things from the console that I’d taken for granted on the desktop:
- Too many. But it made me learn something, so that’s cool.
And now for the important statistics! (Because I’m a pessimist ;-))
- Number of photos that would still fit:
- At least 4 times as many as there currently are!
- Amount of extra bandwidth that could have been transferred:
- At least 8 times as much, but we didn’t do too badly seeing as that was nine days, and the quotas are done monthly.
So… this means if you still haven’t uploaded photos, do so!
On another note, I’m thinking about implementing that upload thing Michael blogged about (or rather, linked to ;-) That doesn’t actually qualify as posting: you’ve still got a way to go before you redeem yourself for lack of that of late!) on the form to make life easier for people who don’t seem to be able to follow my pretty straightforward (I even made pretty screenshots!) “How to make a ZIP file” guide. Ah, technology.
01 Oct 2005
So, I use a Dynamic DNS service to point the CNAME alias record home. on this domain to, surprisingly enough, my home Internet connection with Telstra BigPond (or puddle, whatever).
I’m using a Dynamic DNS service instead of just setting up an A record (much simpler, plus that would mean I could have a catchall on the domain… my current DNS host — also my registrar, Joker.com — doesn’t like wildcard CNAME records, though) because, theoretically, my plan only has a dynamic IP address prone to changing at any given moment. Dynamic DNS services really should only be used by people with dynamic IP addresses, for a number of reasons… the most obvious one being that they are designed to change, and expire if you don’t let them. (At least with DynDNS, which is pretty excellent for the price… free.)
With this in mind, I received this message today:
A hostname you have registered with Dynamic Network Services at DynDNS, sn0239410.dnsalias.net, with current IP address 60.225.85.25, will expire in the next 5 days. This expiration is due to an automatic timeout; your host has not been updated for 30 days, and hosts are removed after not being updated for 35 days. This is our policy to prevent a stagnant DNS system. Users with static IP addresses can use the Static DNS system, which does not have this timeout.
There’s more, I just can’t be bothered repeating it here.
That’s the fourth time I’ve read that paragraph in separate messages. That exact paragraph. Yeah, not even the IP changed.
To give that some time scale, see the quoted portion above: “hosts are removed after not being updated for 35 days”. I’ve manually touched my subdomain’s record once every 35 days or thereabouts for the last four months. Before that, the same situation existed, but then only for three months. Before that? Two. (And before that was iiNet, back in the day, and that doesn’t really bear commenting… every time your modem disconnected you’d get a new IP, and sometimes more often! Though it seems to have improved since…)
Seems to me as though Telstra is slowly and quietly making its dynamic IPs more and more static as broadband adoption picks up. So, Telstra, when are you giving us (mere plebs) IPv6?