BurningbirdEarlier today I was stunned to read about the accusations of sexual harassment against Robert Scoble. We aren’t friends, but we have friends in common and we have interacted remotely in the past.
I had no idea, no clue, that Scoble had harassed women. There are some people you might suspect of doing so, and some people you don’t, and before today I would have listed Scoble in the latter category. It just goes to show that on the internet, people don’t always know you’re a dog.
I upgraded my server to Ubuntu 16.04, converted my websites over to HTTPs, and locked them in using HSTS. It would be a shame to stop here without making one last change: upgrading to the HTTP/2 protocol.
The web has been spinning along on HTTP 1.1 since 1997. It’s been a good and faithful servant. However, the protocol is also showing its age, leading to gimmicks and workarounds just to more readily process today’s web pages.
I was reminded of another valuable resource for accessing court documents: Justia. I’ve used the site many a time, and it’s helped me discover cases related to one entity or another more than once.
You can search for a court case for free at Justia, and once you’ve found the case, you can then directly access the PACER court documents from the returned result. Using Justia you can save on the dime-a-page query forms that PACER provides.
As an example, when I searched on “Front Range Equine Rescue” and New Mexico, I found the listing for the court case I’m currently following related to horse meat plants and USDA inspections that has been on fire with activity today. Yes, I still need to use PACER to access the docket and court cases, but I’ve saved from a dime to a dollar just finding the case.
Hey, every penny counts.
As you can see when you access this page, I’ve made the move to HTTPS. I detail the experience at my new technology-only site, Shelley’s Toy Box.
I upgraded my server before I made the move, and eliminated all the cruft. I also moved my DNS records over to my name registrar, rather than manage on the server.
All in all, the experience was challenging at times, but also interesting. It was fun tweaking with the tech, and I need to do more tech tweaking in the future.
One of the downsides to the move is removing my archived statically generated HTML pages. I now get, on average, over seven hundred 404 requests a day. The numbers will go down as I gradually add the older content into this site, and as search engines drop references to the missing pages. Still, I feel like one big link black hole right now.
The Wayback Machine is extremely helpful when it comes to recovering pages that, for whatever reason, I don’t have backups for. I even found a link to my earliest weblog, a Manila site, hosted by Dave Winer and Userland. I was excited when I found the link. My reactions to the events of 9/11 were recorded in my Manila weblog, and I don’t have a backup of the old posts.
I could have dropkicked Dave Winer when I discovered all the pages have the same message:
Your crawler is hitting our servers too hard. Please slow down, it’s hurting the service we provide to our customers. Thanks. webmaster@userland.com.
Thankfully most of the pages for my many other sites and weblogs are intact. When I restore a page, I try to include a link to the Wayback Machine archive page, because the site also archived the comments.
Seriously, if you’re not donating to the Internet Archive, you should think about starting. It’s our history.
When I set up my new server and moved my DNS records to my name registrar, I also included records for my server’s IPv6 address (2600:3c00::f03c:91ff:fecf:250d), as well as the familiar IPv4 address (72.14.184.192). Supporting both is known as dual stack.
I didn’t have to support IPv6 since I do have an IPv4 address, but if I’m going to do the shiny new with my site, I’m going to go shiny, new all the way.
Besides, there’s no more room at the inn with the old IPv4 system. We’ve run out of web addresses under the old IPv4 addressing system. The current IPv4 system only allows for 4.3 billion addressed, and they’ve all been assigned.
Yeah, haven’t we been prolific on the web.