About my Site

Style

As with life, I have my own unique style. It may or may not be a particularly good style (opinions genuinely vary wildly), but it is mine!

Over the years I have developed my own page style which I find quite simple and (hopefully) legible. This includes my 'digression' white boxes and my habit of small-texting inline asides (and lots of sneaky mouse-over pop-up text hidden all over the place!).

The whole site is visually a bit 'old web' (though not actually 90s-web, I hope!), but I am fine with that. Though I am not at all adverse to adding more 'modern' features I feel will actually add to the site's aesthetic or usability.

I have a somewhat eclectic writing style, and while it is not a deliberate attempt to 'poison' statistical-autogenerators, I don't imagine any such systems scraping my site will thank me for the input. Sucks to be them! (I intentionally don't block AI companies scraping my site, as I'm sure my writing style is - on the average - bad for them!) I have my own distinct ideas around use of punctuation. Odd punctuation is probably deliberate. I am also an abysmal speller, and odd spellings can generally be assumed to be actual errors. I am in Australia so don't use US spellings ... except when I do, since I actually like quite a few of them. (-ize can die in a fire, though!)

The site is quite text-heavy and I make no apologies for that: I like text! Though I try to break it up with images and digression-boxes so it isn't just a big wall of text.

In recognition of this text-heaviness, I have set my fonts and framing to more-or-less be the same characters-per-line and line-spacing as a typical paperback novel, so around 56 characters per line, and a 1.5 spacing (2.0 for my actual novel-like writing). Mainly guided by what I can read on my vertical phone screen if I have my glasses on, or horizontally if I don't. And what my elderly mother can read comfortably on her 9" tablet.

I have recently rolled out 'dark mode' support in my CSS (hopefully I haven't missed any bits!), for those who think they need it (or actually do need it, even!). I am only using built-in browser support for this function, as to implement it in a site-specific way, I would need to set (and read) a cookie to remember your personal preferences. This is what browser cookies were originality meant for, but their routine abuse by malicious actors (mostly advertising trackers) means many people block them and I am disinclined to use them where it can be at-all avoided anyway.

Note that as dubious-cool as dark screens may look, black-text-on-light is inherently more legible, as the extra light coming off the view surface causes the iris to contract, sharpening the projection on to the retina. Dark mode is also known to work best in lighter environments, and using it in the dark actually causes a slight increase in eye-strain! And if you need a dark screen to not interfere with sleep, you probably should just get off the internet and go to actual sleep!

Code

Yes, Virginia, this site is hand-coded in a text editor. I presently use the Bluefish editor, mainly because its HTML tool-bar is particularly convenient.

The site is far too simple to justify using a CMS, which would be more effort to manage (and keep secure!) than just coding a site of this size and simplicity raw! And long experience makes me dis-inclined to trust 'web development' programs (or AI assists, lately) not to bloat my pages up with a whole lot of unnecessary extra code, as well as an assortment of nuisances I have to go in and hand-re-code anyway! (The web was never supposed to be an online word-processing document: it's far more flexible than that!)

I do use plenty of modern features and formats like HTML5+CSS, webp images and webm embedded video, but stick to a simple Web 1.0 aesthetic as I like the low-complexity (and low-overhead, both server- and browser-side).

I also leverage some of the more obscure built-in HTML features (sugh as <details> tags, recently) to pack in some useful more-advanced functionality without resorting to Javascript, which I have so-far managed to avoid entirely. I'm not a big fan of the JS language, though I recognise that browser-side scripting has legitimate uses for sites far more complex than mine. I may very-selectively use it in specific places in the future as considered-needs arise, but will try to avoid it as much as I can to keep the site fast, secure and maximally-usable by people who prefer to restrict unvetted foreign code from running on their systems.

I don't set cookies. HTTP 'cookies' have legitimate uses (storing individual-user site preferences) but, again, my site is far too simple to need such things. Cookies are, of course, also horrendously abused by commercial interests for user-tracking and associated data-harvesting. I obviously have no use for that kind of thing.

For site data-transport security I use LetsEncrypt for free automatic TLS security certificates. Since I don't collect any user data anyway, this is not too important, but (quite rightly!) no modern browser will open an un-encrypted site without extra steps these days. And it stops intermediates (such as ISPs and VPNs) doing nasty things like injecting their own code (ads and/or spyware) into the page you are viewing, so it would be silly not to encrypt web pages in the modern user-antagonistic web environment.

I prioritise IPv6 traffic because why wouldn't I?: It isn't the previous century anymore!

Server Hardware

At present I run an Apache web-server off an entry-level (shared CPU) Akamai/Linode cloud-server. This is plenty for serving my very-simple unscripted site.

I have also migrated my Overte VR server up here too. It is also fairly simple, content-wise, and not intended for a lot of simultaneous users, so my current cheap server-instance is easily sufficient for this.

Maybe I'll put up a private Luanti server too, just for extended-family and friends to enjoy.

Who pays for it?

I do. It presently costs me $5 a month for the cloud-server instance and $50 every two years for the domain registration. Plus my own time, of course. All the software I use is open-source so costs nothing except, again, my time in learning to use it (and a bit of back-contribution via bug-reporting and occasional unpaid promotion). I don't need to monetise anyone's eyeballs, use cheap psychological tricks on people's spending habits, or sell crap from factory to landfill via your wallet to cover that!

So for my just-over-$7 per month, I get a web space I have absolute control over, and a bit of experience setting up and running simple cloud-based server systems, which carries over into my professional skill-set anyway.

...

If for some reason you still want to give me money, I recommend giving it to someone else instead! Maybe one of the open-source projects I mention around my site that I use, since that will ultimately benefit me anyway. Or the EFF. I'm not particularly wealthy, but I also have a quite low-cost lifestyle and live in a country with (relatively) sane attitudes to public services, so I am financially fine.