Webmaster stuff | End the War on Freedom

Blog Inactive

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:06:00 GMT

I'm blogging right now at billstclair.com/journal. Not here.

I'm working on Elmlog, to replace Lisplog.

Site Was Down

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 17:42:33 GMT

The billstclair.com Droplet at Digital Ocean in NYC, stopped noticing the network. So I created a new droplet, from a backup of the old one, and aimed DNS at it. Appears to work. Let me know if something is missing, oh handful of faithful old friends.

Thank You Jacob at Wideners

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 19:57:12 GMT

I received an email reporting on a broken link on this site. I get these fairly often. They're mostly nonsense about some ancient blog post, which I keep broken for historical accuracy. But this one was about a link in the sidebar of every page, with the John Lott quote. So I fixed it.

Thanks to Jacob from Widener's Reloading & Shooting Supply.

thementalmilitia.com server upgrade

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 14:54:17 GMT

I upgraded the Ubuntu on https://secure.thementalmilitia.com to 16.04, and it all went off without a hitch, but the forums showed a blank page.

This was due to SMF using a deprecated and as of PHP 7.0 defunct PHP API for MySql databases. I found a compatibility patch, and that fixed the problem.

The forums are now working under Ubuntu 16.04.

Server Updated to Ubuntu 16.04LTS

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 12:52:26 GMT

With the release of Ubuntu 18.04LTS, I have upgraded the server for this web site to Ubuntu 16.04LTS. I feel no need to follow the bleeding edge for a stable operating system, but 14.04 will only be supported for another year, so it was time to go to 16.04.

Disk Full

Sat, 23 Sep 2017 06:30:25 GMT

I've had a cold for the past few days, so haven't checked my News Aggregator. I check it for two reasons:

1) I find interesting things there.
2) To ensure that it's still running every half hour.

Well, it hadn't run since Thursday. A little poking around discovered that the reason was because my virtual disk was full. Found 2.5 gigs to delete, and I'm back in business.

No More Google Ads

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 20:57:43 GMT

I've been running a Google banner ad, on the top and bottom of every page, since October of 2016. $15 total revenue over all that time. Not worth bothering with. Removed from template. All 6,104 HTML pages re-rendered.

New Logo: Mountain Man Bill

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 13:54:36 GMT

I got tired of the red words in the upper-left-hand corner, so I replaced them with an image of me in full mountain-man beard, which I cut off a few years back. Here's a bigger version:

/images/mountain-man-479x479.jpg' alt='Mountain Man' width='479' height='479'/>

My News Aggregator

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:49:01 GMT

One of the things I like best about having brought End the War on Freedom back from the dead ('E's not dead. 'E's only sleeping), is that I once again have a news aggregator to peruse, instead of clicking on individual web sites. It's available from the "news aggregator" link in the left column's "Navigation" section. I am now aggregating 70 feeds, though some of them are no longer active.

I've been adding new feeds of late. When I do, you'll see a whole bunch of stories from that source, all bunched up. That's because my aggregation code stores its output in static files on my server's disk, so a newly-added site's initial RSS feed provides old stories that will appear as new when first encountered. After that, however, everything is interleaved in post-time order.

Enjoy!

Google Ads

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 02:21:04 GMT

I have decided to try a Google ad, to see if I can make a little money from this web page. I have always eschewed ads, but I'd love to make something from my work, so I'm going to put one at the top of every page. I'll try it out here on the main page, and the most recent posts for a little while, and if I think it's OK, I'll re-render the whole site, to put the ad on every page.