I've been running my (this) vanity website and mail server on Linux machines I administer myself since 1998 or so, but it's time to rebuild the machine and hosting static HTTPS no longer makes sense in a world where GitHub or AWS can handle it flexibly and reliably for effectively free. I did want to keep running my own mail server, but centralization in email has made delivery iffy and everyone I'm communicating with is on gmail, so the data is going there anyway.

Two days ago I powered down a good server for the first time in years and the last time ever. It doesn't compare to euthanizing a pet, but it still made me more sad than I expected. Below is a remembrance. I've made the server male because once you've gotten so silly as to write a eulogy for a server you might as well go all out.

Ry4an.org II was a good server. In 2001 his Pentium III hardware was already old -- corporate castoff acquired for free. He took a Fedora install without any configuration hassles and always assigned the same ethX numbers to each of his three PCI NICs, without aliases in the modules.conf, which Ry4an.org I could never get right.

I just rebuilt the ry4an.org server, and as part of the migration I realized a still had a lot of very old, almost embarrassing content online. I took the broken or not-conceivably interesting stuff off-line and am serving up 410 GONE responses for it.

There exists, however, a broad swath of stuff that's not yet entirely useless, but is more than ten years old and not stuff I would likely post today. For all of these pages I've left the content up, but you first have to click through a modal dialog warning you you're looking at very old stuff I don't necessarily endorse. That pop up looks like this:

I'm thus far thrilled with blohg as a blogging platform. I've got a large post I'm finishing up now with quite a few snippets of source code in two different programming languages. I was hoping to use the excellent SyntaxHighlighter javascript library to prettify those snippets, and was surprised to find that docutils reStructuredText doesn't yet do that (though some other implementations do).

Fortunately, adding new rendering directives to reStructuredText is incredibly easy. I was able to add support for a .. code mode with just this little bit of Python:

This blog started out called the unblog back when blog was a new-ish term and I thought it was silly. I'd been on mailing lists like fork and Kragan Sitaker's tol for years and couldn't see a difference between those and blogs. I set up some mailing list archive software to look like a blog and called it a day.

Years later that platform was aging, and wikis were still a new and exciting concept, so I built a blog around a wiki. The ease of online editing was nice, though readers never took to wiki-as-comments like I hoped. It worked well enough for a good many years, but I kept having a hard time finding my own posts in Google. Various SEO-blocking strategies Google employs that I hope never to have to understand were pushing my entries below total crap.

I've switched from a mailing list driven system to a wiki based one for this UnBlog. It's less weird than the mailing list setup was, but it's not exactly moveable type either. It offers RSS feeds and subscriptions, though through entirely different mechanisms than the list did. I think I've moved everything over well enough that there are no dead links into the old space. I ended up using my WikiChump thing modified to handle attachments and create comment pages to populate the data.

My good friends Luke (http://justlooking.recursion.org/) and Gabe (http://twol.dopp.net/) are working on a project that archives mailings lists to blogging software. Essentially something that subscribes to lists and gateways to posts in a blog. I politely told them the idea didn't make sense to me and instead advocated just putting a blog-look onto existing mailing list software. This is my attempt to put my money where my mouth is.