2013 Year in Review

Another year of hardly any updates another year of summing it all up in one post at the end of the year.

Hopefully 2014 I'll be paying more attention to my site.

One thing you probably didn't notice is I've finally stopped using the "All rights reserved" copyright notice. This is a carry over from years gone by where I saw a lot of company sites put that on their pages. Not knowing what it even meant I stuck it at the bottom of my pages. Well that was just silly of me so now all content on this site is licensed creative commons by-nc-sa v4.0. This means you can use anything on here so long as you give me credit for it, any modifications are also similarly licensed, and that you don't make money off my content. This is actually how I've always been but never updated the site accordingly. Note that these are just your default rights but if you're doing something where you really don't want to give me credit or something then contact me and we can work something out. Coincidentally since the prior license was all rights reserved it's easy for me to now declare all past content on this site is also CC BY-NC-SA. This probably isn't a huge deal for anyone but I wanted to put that wording in there to show my full intent of re-licensing all content in case a lawyer comes by one day and needs to make sure it's all good.

With all the security news recently I'm going to enhance the security of this site. First off I'm moving all content hosted elsewhere and host it locally. The main things this includes are the images (currently hosted on flickr) and comments (currently hosted by intense debate).

The images should be simple enough to do (I'll still have links to the flickr page as there are some comments there from people).

Comments are going to be a little more tricky. What I'm thinking of doing is dropping comments from the site. Instead I'd come up with a hashtag and say if you want to comment on this then use that hashtag. While I'm not a big fan of saying "post the comment elsewhere" I also realize that the last comment made by anyone was January 2011. Could that be because I'm using intense debate? don't know. This is also something I'm still thinking about. I may go back to the standard name, email (hidden), and comment. Let me know if you have any suggestions. As for old comments, I'll get a dump of the comments from intense debate and have them statically included in the page. As a nice side effect of all this you don't have to allow third party cookies or have javascript on to use the site (only existing thing will be google analytics and if you keep javascript off for that it's not going to prevent anything on the site)

One thing I'm still dedicate to doing, no ads. Mostly this is just the realization that this is such low traffic that any ad revenue would take years before I earned enough for payout. I will still do the amazon referral links because it doesn't affect the price you pay and it gets me something although to be fair I have yet to make enough on there to see any money, and I think the minimum is $1

Also thinking of finally switching away from PHP. It's served it's purpose but it's just always been annoying to use. I've been looking at django and it seems nice enough. Aside from my gripe about versioning (seriously people, Semantic Versioning). At least python itself follows it (unlike ruby's "versioning format" if you call it that. Interestingly rails seems to follow it though). Also django has a documented process on how they do versions and what versions are supported. Yes, this paragraph was mostly a rant against project versioning. Heck even this site I have internal versions (currently at v5 and will be on v6 when/if I rewrite for django)

Aside from website stuff I plan on recreating my pgp key soon. 2048 bit keys are perfectly secure but nowadays computers can handle 4096 bit keys.

Although still not complete, I'm working on moving all the server stuff at home to a server running ESXi. I still have to move most things over but it should reduce the heat and electric bills. Also with virtual machines I can do things like have production scripts (for example my xkcd twitter bot) running on a separate server than the one I'm developing on.

In other geeky news, I've slowly converted to using Vim pretty much full time. It was always my editor of choice in terminal but I've been using the gui versions in windows and mac as well.

So if you have any input on anything either leave a comment here or the main social site I'm on is twitter