# July 3, 2024

It's been a while!

The server was down for a bit, everything should be back to normal now.

- The hngopher.com domain name was transferred from Google Domains to
  Squarespace (Google is shutting down their domain service and sold
  off my account). This caused my dynamic DNS setup to break. I have
  since transferred the domain into Digital Ocean and fixed the DNS.
  The new nameservers may take up to 48 hours to propagate.
- My RaspberryPi SD card ran out of space. 20GB of temporary files
  created by w3m for some reason. I cleaned those up and there's
  plenty of room for (hopefully) years to come.
- The guestbook page failed to rebuild (likely due to the storage
  issue above). I manually regenerated and verified that new posts
  are working again.

Cheers <3

# October 1, 2019

I've made some changes to the layout of the live feed. Lately I have
been trying to embrace gopher-centric design and menu hierarchies:

- The menu layout has been tweaked slightly to reduce clutter.

- The link to the parent page is no longer included at the top of
  each page's menu. Instead, you are encouraged to use your gopher
  client's back button.

- Relative timestamps are no longer shown next to comments because
  they don't add much value and become out-of-date when viewing old
  pages.

In addition, there is a new option to view a cached, plain-text copy
of a linked story. The text dump is generated using the "w3m -dump".
command. It's far from perfect, but it may be useful if you want to
avoid firing up a web browser.

Lastly, I have reduced the number of stories in the live feed from
100 (20x5 pages) to 60 (20x3 pages). This is in-part to offset the
additional storage that will be needed to archive the w3m page dumps.

These changes come with a much needed refactoring of the script used
to scrape hacker news stories. If you notice any new bugs or oddities,
please send me an email or open an issue on github.

# June 7, 2019

The server has been unreachable for the past three days. I installed
a new router at my house, and had to fight with Comcast for hours in
order to get access to the port forwarding settings again. I will be
monitoring for further connectivity issues.

The decentralized internet, brought to you by XFINITY (tm).

# May 11, 2019

The server has been moved from an RPi 1 Model B to an RPi 3.
Double the RAM and 4x the CPU cores! This should help to
alleviate some of the slowness that I was observing,
particularly when posting new messages to the guestbook.

I have also refreshed the formatting on several pages. This
was done as part of an effort to streamline the UI experience.
Of note, the guestbook is now cleaner and no longer attempts
to include geo-location data based on the message IP address.

Since I was migrating the server, I took the opportunity to
create a backup. The /archive section is now up to 2.4 GB in
total size.