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Kurt Weiske's other blog.

Retro tech enthusiast, photgrapher, and systems guy.

Blogging like it's 1999. Static blog generation, talking tech...

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  •        
    Tue, 04 Jul 2023

    Blosxom weirdness

    I just realized that going back and editing one of the text files Bloxsom uses resets the modified-by date and puts it at the top of the list.

    posted at: 12:28 | path: | permanent link to this entry

    Another day, another editor

    Playing with .vimrc files for the first time in ages. Looking for a nice medium contrast theme. Nano is another editor I haven't used in a minute. I seem to recall a way to have nano auto-wrap long lines, as it is now I need to hit alt-J to wrap the whole file.

    tilde.chat, the IRC server shared by the other tildes has a fun trivia channel - I'm keeping it running in the background when I work.

    On the retro front, I just processed a request for a Fidonet node number from a sysop running a mailer he wrote himself, running on OpenVMS. That's got to be a first, especially since he's writing his mailer from scratch.

    I have a couple of friends who ran obsolete, orphaned hardware from a time when computers weren't so boring.

    One of them rescued a MIPS-based Windows NT 3.51 system and ran a web site on an old version of IIS for many years past its practical life. Another ran AI/X on an IBM PowerPC desktop system and ran his web site on that for years.

    My foray was running a Sun SparcStation 2 with 48 megabytes of RAM. I used that system as a development box and a backup to a Sendmail bastion host for years, reading mail from Exchange in PINE.

    posted at: 12:27 | path: | permanent link to this entry

    I've forgotten more....

    HTML than I remember. I've been hand-hacking my blosxom template and adding inline CSS - and it's been a good 15-20 years since I did this by hand. When did Allaire Homesite come out? 1997? 1998? I worked at the company that bought Allaire and killed Homesite within months of the company purchase, to prevent Homesite from taking sales from their much more expensive tool. I wondered why they bought it in the first place... I miss the old web - the hand-hacked, non-federated, non-social networked web. This is my stroll down memory lane.

    I remember trying blosxom when I'd first heard of it, probably about the same 1997-1999 timeframe? It seemed like that's when I remember the first tilde pages and the first web sites owned by real people. I don't think I ever got it running in production, it was probably a little too soon. My first blog attempt was hosted on a Linux box at my house, the content was written on Blogger, and back then, blogger could FTP the static files to your web server. I'd use a Windows app like w.bloggar to write the entry, upload them to Blogger, and Blogger would upload the files to the linux server sitting next to me.

    Seemed a little roundabout, but we were happy to be able to serve web pages at all, let alone do it efficiently.

    posted at: 12:26 | path: | permanent link to this entry