Out of The PIT

I've finally finished turning The PIT into a static website. The whole thing ballooned from about 10MB to 200MB in size! This is what happens when you have a lot of repetitive HTML. So the site itself is currently on my temporary web server . But I plan on blowing the old web server away and starting fresh with just the wedding website and The PIT hosted on it. I can then just let it run forever.. Unless I plan on hosting another static website there. I should have plenty of space.. *rubs chin*

My lift supports came in today so I picked them up this afternoon and was fortunate enough to have some sunlight available to install the new supports. I discovered, to my dismay, that the connectors for the supports were facing the wrong way, but after noticing that the two new supports I had both connectors facing different directions than the other support, gave me hope that I could twist the end around so that it would fit. It took quite a bit of torque, since it was hard to grip the thing. Otherwise, the whole installation was fairly straightforward and only took me thirty minutes, which got chilly on this spring evening. I'm just happy that I don't have to keep my broomball stick in my trunk to keep the lid open!

It has taken me a lot longer than anticipated to static-ify (is that even a word?) my old website. Getting it up and running took a little time, and conversion was fairly painless, although each conversion takes over an hour to do. So after each conversion, I would take a look into the log to see if there were any errors I need to deal with. This led to many alterations on the web page to take into account the lack of form processing in static HTML files, which took up the bulk of the time this weekend for changes. However, even after getting that out of the way, I still had issues with broken links and improper settings. I mean, the site pretty much is 99% working. That 1% really bothers me though and it will take another day or so to fix. Annoying!

I came across a product called HTTrack Website Copier which I ran against my website. It did a pretty good job of pulling everything and compiling a nice, neat, self contained folder with just about everything from my website! Now there are some things that it does not handle too well, like forms, and there were quite a number of broken links on my page, but this is a good sign. I do think I'll just fix up the links on the page, make some changes to deal with the forms, and compile a static site so I won't have to worry about it for the rest of my life?

I've had a task on my list for quite some time: Revive the PIT. Since I had purchased a virtual server a year ago, I have had the tools to set it up, but just never bothered starting the project. There were some security issues that bothered me, and I wanted to convert my website so that it was static. Making the website static would mean requiring only a very small and simple web server to host the page, but to do that I had to bring the site back on line. I finally gathered the will to set it up this weekend. Well, I had anticipated working on it all weekend, but managed to bring it online in four hours. Some things may still be broken, but right now I realize that because of the way I had set up the web page, I can not easily freeze the site like our wedding website. I think I'll leave the website up for a bit. After I clean out any of the old data and remove some of the unnecessary functionality I'll reassess the situation and decide then whether or not to keep the ...

My right index finger feels like it's permanently jammed. MJNL thinks it's because of overuse, and I am inclined to agree with her. I've tried applying pressure to the muscle that controls that finger, but this issue seems fairly chronic, as it has not gotten better over the weeks. MJNL has the same issue, and attributes it mostly to excessive writing. My routine hasn't changed much for the past year, and after changing my ergonomics and use of braces, I thought I had limited this type of impact. I guess the stress just transferred up the arm. In any case, I've been moving things to my left hand again: badminton, mouse use, carrying stuff, just to give my right hand a rest. We'll see if things improve, since broomball should be ending in a month and that would just leave hockey..

We had a rather large CME earlier this week, and I had wanted to make a note at checking the space weather but it had completely slipped my mind. MJNL sent me a link that had some photos from the one that hit on Tuesday . Gosh darned it! But in hindsight, the weather was kinda overcast last night so I do not feel too bad for missing it..