Notes of Chaos 2: The Revengening
The original Notes of Chaos met its demise a couple of weeks ago.
It was hosted on a server that, unbeknownst to me, had changed hands a couple of years. It went from my reliable friend Dan to a guy that runs a popular webcomic. Dan had been running the server for this guy, and since the guy generated most of the traffic for the server, he started paying for it and took ownership from Dan.
Recently, some other users’ processes on the server had been bringing it down. The webcomic guy got irritated that these guys that were using his server for free were interfering with his livelihood and didn’t want to figure out whose process it was, so he locked all of the users out. He didn’t give any notice but did later at least send Dan the other users’ files. It was basically an eviction – we were locked out, and our stuff was at the door. He was all EVERYBODY GET OUT NOW THIS IS MY SERVER YOU ARE TAKING FOOD OUT OF MY MOUTH AND I ALREADY STARTED CHEWING IT
It’s understandable, but I’d like to think I wouldn’t do it that way. Who knows, though. Maybe he was losing thousands of dollars a day and couldn’t give people a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, I counted on corrupt.net being around forever, so Notes depended on a lot of things installed on that server. It needed procmail, Perl, cron, MySQL, PHP, and worst of all, the ability to execute a binary because the Notes posting client was written in C. (In 2002, I felt more comfortable writing anything in C than in Perl or any of the other more appropriate languages for this.) I can get most of those things on from a hosting company, but man, that’s a lot of shit to get together, and I just don’t have enough heart to do it.
So, I’m going to post here, every so often. There’s a lot less that I feel is worth writing about lately, which you might have noticed. At the end of the run of the old Notes, most of the posts were automated collections of content from other sources at which I posted – Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us, and others. Amin was telling me that he wasn’t as into that stuff as actual original content made specifically for that weblog, so I imagine others weren’t into it as well. On the other hand, I really enjoyed seeing the power of automation in effect every day. Also, I liked having almost everything I put online, stupid or not, collected and archived in one place.
I’m not going to bother generating automated posts of that sort to this Wordpress blog, however. Since you can post via email, I’m sure it’s possible, but for your sake (I think), I’m going to keep it clean. If you still want to see the stuff from other content sources, however, you can:
del.icio.us
Twitter
Flickr
Goodreads
All of the pages above have RSS feeds and the social network type sites they belong to all have “friend” features, so you can friend me or watch them via RSS if you want.
Alternatively, you can see that stuff all aggregated again at FriendFeed. (Which also has RSS feeds.) Options!
Or, you can just breath a sigh of relief that you won’t be bothered with that crap anymore.
Thanks for reading, guys. I hope you get out of this weblog whatever you did out of the previous one, if anything!
Tags: aggregation, history
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