State of the domain

Friday 7 January 2005 - Filed under General + Software

blueslugs.com turned five this week. A reasonable time to take stock. The domain’s first days were hosted over the DSL line in our apartment in Menlo Park on—wait for it—a PowerMac 7100 running MkLinux. Since then, it’s been hosted on an Ultra 10, a Netra T1, and finally on a Shuttle, running various versions of Solaris. The past year had a few events worth reviewing.

Overview. Last year, we shipped out a total of over 850 MB of data, through the thin little upstream pipe our DSL line offers. Log analysis translates to over 150 000 hits and over 10 000 visitors. Over the year, 24 blog posts were written, three by Dina. Fortnightly posting probably doesn’t mean much, but demonstrates that the domain hasn’t been abandoned. (Perhaps populated by blue sloths, blue snails, or…)

Content. Pages from Benjamin‘s alphabet book remain the most popular real content—and the most often requested by searches. We started a subsite for Nathaniel and a second blog to keep friends apprised of Dina’s father’s illness. The various syndication files are regularly requested, and the traffic from the blog aggregation sites and the search engines increased noticably for the last third of the year.

A few people are still downloading the dockapps I wrote a couple of years ago. Beyond some logfile software and a few tips, we didn’t provide very much new technical content. The distribution between technical content on my blogs.sun.com blog and on blueslugs.com is consistent; I don’t see a reason to merge the two. (For instance, reviews will remain on this site.)

I attempted some quasi-journalism/opinion about some of the local elections; as that writing is mostly related to my interest in Redwood City as a place to live, it will probably continue at some erratic rate.

System. The server hardware is unchanged, except that an APC UPS was installed to insulate the system from the local power sags we’ve been seeing. The small Shuttle system barely taxes the UPS so we should be able to survive even half hour outages easily. (By survive, I mean preserve uptime(1).) With Nathaniel’s arrival, the office (and so the server) was relocated to the cottage (where I spent many a late night the past six months).

blueslugs.com is now running a recent express release of Solaris 10 x86, complete with smf(5) service conversions for some of the software services. Much of the server software is precompiled and fetched from blastwave.org or one of its mirrors.

Future. I don’t think there’s any pressing need to modify the server’s hardware; the software we’ll upgrade occasionally with new Solaris releases. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures with the phone on my camera (or whatever)—so much so that Ben’s not satisfied with a toy cellphone that lacks a camera. Those images need to reach the web somehow. No resolutions to post more; perhaps a little one to post better.

2005-01-07  »  Stephen