about / contact
Want to say something but are too cowardly to post a comment?
Contact MDA.
“Where do you get off, MDA, hosting a site like this?”
Anywhere I want.
The history of this ongoing jaunt through the ethereal medium we call ‘cyberspace’:
The only reason I’ve ever really thrown various effluences onto the web has been simply to learn just how one goes about throwing out varied effluence. My first forays, then, were concentrated on HTML. HTML 1.1, if I had to guess. Actual content, I suppose was first written back in high school when Lincoln and I were poking at various bits of the internet. We threw together a webpage based (loosely) on our individual efforts. Tables galore. I think we spent more time arguing about the colors we were going to use than actually writing any content. Wait – I think I still do that. To the best of my knowledge, none of that site is archived anywhere; this is likely a good thing.
More scintillating efforts were made in college when I decided I needed to know something about scripting. An IM quote board [not for the pure of ears] was developed in order to chronical the lives of my suite and its multitudinous hangers on. Much perl and much javascript (and, eventually, a webcam) led to some entertaining times.
By the time I got to grad school, though, I decided I should really have some sort of permanent (read “transient and intermittent”) account of my adventures. The obvious solution was to jump on the bandwagon and start writing a blog (‘what is this thing you call, “blog”?’). Essentially, though, it was an excuse for me to learn CSS. .in need of a life. was born, complete with (nearly) symmetric punctuation and a fierce distain for capital letters.
But bloggers cannot live on CSS alone. To make the effort worthwhile, the site must be database driven (hence my brief stint with blogger), and to truly master the medium, powerful, server-side scripts must be employed. And he saw that WordPress was good. Rather than outsourcing everything, however, I figured that at the same time I was “learning” MySQL and PHP I might as well figure out how to set up my own web/email server. Thus, we have what you see here now used to see here. The fully operational blog station that is blogwaffe.com.
These days, I’m hosted by the awesome folk at TextDrive. It turns out that hosting a site behind a cable modem is really annoying.
Why is your site slow and/or what’s that annoying “:8000” for?
My webserver is connected to the rest of the world at large via a cable modem with limited upload bandwidth. I was thinking about getting some Internet2 backbone running into the apartment, but the electricity bill would have gone through the roof. So you’re stuck with a little lag. As for the “:8000”, Charter (my cable company) blocks port 80, which is the standard interface used for retrieving web documents over the internet by a protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Whenever you type in a web address in your browser, unless you specify otherwise, your browser will prepend it with http:// to specify what protocol should be used to retrieve the information. And, again in less you specify otherwise, the http protocol assumes you want to use port 80. Charter blocks port 80 to discourage people from hosting websites from behind their cable modems; they failed to discourage me. But because of the port 80 block, I have to host my site with a different port (port 8000). It works just the same, but since 8000 is not the default port for HTTP, the client (you) has to specify what port to use manually.
As a “fun excersize” you can append :80 to all of the web sites’ domain names you visit to verify that, indeed, port 80 is the normal interface for HTTP.
As noted above, I no longer self host this site from my apartment.
