ampr.orgThis is a great story about some amateur radio folks who acquired a block of IP addresses in the early internet days and recently sold them to Amazon for millions of dollars. Their plan:
infrastructure
ampr.org
inessential.comBrent Simmons on his blog tech setup. I like his micro.blog idea but I have mixed feelings on syndicating out to services like Twitter and Facebook. a.) They are terrible for society and individuals. b.) I think you need to be ‘present’ and interacting for the social part of social media. Maybe you can do both, but: society.
Similarly: Always own your platform.
Similarly: Always own your platform.
abandonedrails.com"Thousands of miles of railroads have been abandoned in the United States, much of it in the last 40 years."This is a fun site to browse. You can look for abandoned tracks via maps and read about the history of failed business ventures. Then you might follow that up with Extreme Railbiking which triggered my fear of heights in 30 seconds.
Medium | Javascript
The headline is a little alarmist, but this is a great explanation of some bitcoin scam code that someone placed into a popular node package. I agree that building businesses on top of volunteers is not sustainable and I hope the Node community can work on a solution. Reusing community code is a fast way to develop but you trade away some security.
(WATER)
Sunday scene
c2bk Infrastructure Report: Hearts
If you're like me, this site has become your primary social network. Whether it's the hours you've spent arguing in the comments section, the days poring through the archives looking for hidden gems, or even those few minutes on the about page trying to answer the question, "Why is this here?" you've come to expect the best and are often delighted beyond expectation. Yes, all of these things are true, and more.
So I was perplexed the other day by an exchange I had with a friend. My online buddy casually messaged, "What do you use for your blog?" I typed back, "Why, PHP and MySQL, my good friend!" He responded, "You wrote your own thing?" I said, "Indeed! Would you like the code?" His final reply was like a punch in the gut: "No one has time for that. I'll use Medium."
No one has time for that. I'll use Medium.
Let that sink in. I knew in my heart that couldn't be true. What does Medium have that onfocus hasn't? And then it hit me like a second, more forceful punch in the gut: hearts. Medium has hearts.
I didn't get mad. I started building. And as of today, onfocus has hearts. At the bottom of every post is the option to click a heart symbol. What does clicking the heart symbol do? It fills in the heart so that it goes from being the outline of a heart to a solid heart. What does clicking the heart symbol mean? That's a question that each onfocus reader must answer for themselves.
I expect this feature to become the very pulse of this site, driving the blood (data) filled with rich oxygen to the vital organs (server) and then carrying it (clicks) away to the liver (apache logs) for detoxification (pageviews).
Who has time for what now?
So I was perplexed the other day by an exchange I had with a friend. My online buddy casually messaged, "What do you use for your blog?" I typed back, "Why, PHP and MySQL, my good friend!" He responded, "You wrote your own thing?" I said, "Indeed! Would you like the code?" His final reply was like a punch in the gut: "No one has time for that. I'll use Medium."
No one has time for that. I'll use Medium.
Let that sink in. I knew in my heart that couldn't be true. What does Medium have that onfocus hasn't? And then it hit me like a second, more forceful punch in the gut: hearts. Medium has hearts.
I didn't get mad. I started building. And as of today, onfocus has hearts. At the bottom of every post is the option to click a heart symbol. What does clicking the heart symbol do? It fills in the heart so that it goes from being the outline of a heart to a solid heart. What does clicking the heart symbol mean? That's a question that each onfocus reader must answer for themselves.
I expect this feature to become the very pulse of this site, driving the blood (data) filled with rich oxygen to the vital organs (server) and then carrying it (clicks) away to the liver (apache logs) for detoxification (pageviews).
Who has time for what now?
Strange Loop IP Spoofing Talk
An engineer at Cloudflare shares some data from the front lines of fighting DDoS attacks. He also makes the connection between DDoS and service centralization and offers some potential solutions. (Unfortunately I don't see any incentive for big companies to fix this problem.)
An engineer at Cloudflare shares some data from the front lines of fighting DDoS attacks. He also makes the connection between DDoS and service centralization and offers some potential solutions. (Unfortunately I don't see any incentive for big companies to fix this problem.)
Really nice to see PRX's RadioPublic using RSS and open standards to extend podcasting rather than working to lock people into a particular client.
c2bk Infrastructure Report
Infrastructure updates to this blog continue apaceish:
And for fun here are the services I use for this site:
I still feel more couch than blogK at this point, but ticking off items that have been on my to-do list since the early part of this century feels good.
1 Proper pronunciation?
2 The hovering businessman emoji's ska roots.
- HTTPS1 on at all times
- Emoji everywhere
- Friendlier URLs for posts with slugs
- CSS now SASS-y
- Super modern git and CDN deploy process with a bash script
- Cutting edge access reports with analog
- Most recent CodeMirror for textarea while composing posts
- Deferred loading of video embeds
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
And for fun here are the services I use for this site:
- Hover for domain registry 2
- DigitalOcean for the virtual server
- AWS CloudFront for hosting images, scripts, and stylesheets
- ZoneEdit for DNS
I still feel more couch than blogK at this point, but ticking off items that have been on my to-do list since the early part of this century feels good.
1 Proper pronunciation?
2 The hovering businessman emoji's ska roots.
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"My personal information, my finances, my family connections, my ideas--all are now in the hands of those to whom I have submitted." (Can we please centralize and scale Paul Ford?)
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Dang, we ended up with a top-down Internet anyway. "Today, Google and a handful of other major Internet corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon fulfill much the same role that Otlet envisioned for the Mundaneum—channeling the world’s intellectual output." [via RF]