September 2 - Keep on keepin' on

I have no idea why this spider is so massive..  He's inside my garage, on the side window.  I figured there wouldn't be much food for him in there, and he wouldn’t last too long, but it seems I'm wrong!  Nearing the end of the season, here he is, big as ever.

Speaking of webs..

As August wore on, I started getting the usual notices about domain names expiring, hosting needing to be renewed, and all that other stuff.  After having chewed up another shared hosting plan, and hitting restriction after restriction of the hosting plan, Chris and I decided it was time to move on to another place.

What we really wanted was an ISP or someone where I could colocate my own box, so I could do what I wanted to it - manage my own DNS, run whatever processes I want, have as many "files" as I want (our former host limited us to 100,000 files in total…  then counted all the log files they created for me against that limit).  But, free bandwidth is hard to come by, and I can't afford a proper server with redundant everything, so we went with the next-best: A hosted VPS.

So we have all the luxuries of a real host, but it's a VM, living somewhere in the US.  Nice thing about that little fact, is that since we have a US IP address, with some simple software called OpenVPN, we can now gain access to US-only stuff.

Like Pandora.

How I've missed Pandora.

Anyhow - we have also let Riley's domain lapse, as we haven't updated it in the last year, we didn't think it was worth the cost to continue maintaining it.  We fully expect it to wind up the hands of some link farmer, but also expect that it won't get a lot revenue for the link farmer, and it'll get freed up in a year or so anyways.

It's tough to figure out how to own your identity online anyways.  My benchmark is that if I can search for me, and find me, then I'm good.  As for the boys, it's hard to say what the Facebook or Twitter of their time will be.  Will there be a new social way own your own identity?  Will we be switching BACK to the blog / wordpress / livejournal way (that I'm doing right now)?  Tough to say for sure, but I'm not certain that in 10 years, having a domain name with your "name" on it will really matter, given the success of Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and so on.