Back To Blog
Well, it has been about a month and a half since I have made an entry on the blog. The reasons for my negligence are many, I suppose, but one of the major problems has been my connection.
I host this website myself. There really isn't a good reason to do that anymore… There are a large number of free (or almost free) blog-hosting services, which do all of the setup for you. The next step in complexity are the web hosting services, which run the servers and provide space to upload. Those are amazingly cheap, too, and provide 24/7 service.
But: I've learned a lot setting up Apache on Debian Linux, and I've gotten a better understanding of the infrastructure of this amazing internet. (The "New Seven Wonders of the World" are ridiculous and almost irrelevant. I like crumbling old monuments built with slave labor as much as anyone, but the REAL action is in the huge scale of humankind's more recent creative achievements. Where are the wonder drugs, like Herceptin, that save lives through detailed science of genetics? For the sake of all that is good, where is the Internet on that list?)
Anyway, I've purchased my domain name from GoDaddy, and that experience has been generally good. I recently upgraded my internet connection from Earthlink's residential DSL plan to the Small-Office DSL plan. This gave me a static IP address, a more stable connection, and better upload/download speeds. In the past, I used Dynu.Com for DNS (the service that directs requests from "borlik.net" to the IP address of my machine, e.g. 192.168.0.1). Unfortunately, their service has been HORRIBLE over the past several months, and (even though I had the premium plan) required a service ticket every time my IP address changed. I gave up on them, and switched to EveryDNS , and that seems to be a much better service. (By the way, DNSreport is a great way to check DNS configuration problems.)
So, I am much happier with our network now, and maybe this will even result in more blog content.