intertwingly

I’ve clearly been neglecting my little spot on the web.

It has gotten so bad that Brendan Eich had to link to a web archive copy of a page of mine.  I must say, however, that it is very ironic and amusing that it is was that particular page.  The problem turned out not to be a software problem, but rather a (presumably inadvertent) DOS attack on feedvalidator.org, causing CGI processes to fail.  Blocking the IP address in question caused the problem to clear up.

General outline of my current approach:

• My interface to my weblog will no longer be Python/CGI application on a hosted server.  Instead it will be a Ruby/Sinatra application on my private home server where keeping things up to date is much easier for me.  That application will produce static HTML, CSS, StyleSheet, and a single feed, all of which will be rsync'ed to the public server.
• The only services exposed will be search and comments.  Comments initially be disabled, and when they return they will likely be moderated, though I may make the moderation queue publicly visible.
• My current focus is a software update.  The overall look and feel will (at least initially) remain the same. 
• The pages produced will be HTML5, though all pages may not always pass validation.  Mike is 100% correct: different people can make different judgment calls.  In particular, I continue to find that explicitly quoting all attributes and explicitly closing all elements both reduces authoring errors and enables a wider variety of user agents to parse the pages correctly.
• I’ll likely drop many features that were popular at one time, but no longer appear to be.  An example of this: OpenID.