About this Site
PrevNode LinkNextWhy did you get the www.shlomifish.org domain?
Node LinkNextWell, I originally set up my home-site on shlomif.il.eu.org, which is a free DNS service, but it had a lot of DNS problems. Thus, I set up https://www.shlomifish.org/. I didn’t take shlomifish.org.il because .il domains used to cost a lot of money, and also required co-ordination by a fax message (how low-tech!) upon every change. I also didn’t want a .com domain because I feel I’m a private individual rather than a company.
http://shlomifish.org/ used to be a parked hostname of my DNS registrar, but now redirects to www.shlomifish.org. This is also the case for shlomifish.com, which I bought later.
Why are you using the “www.” domain prefix for your site?
Node LinkThere is no clear consensus whether “www.” or plain "shlomifish.org" should be used. It makes the URLs somewhat longer but I also have the “shlom.in” domain which may likely allow for even shorter URLs. Also see colour of the bikeshed arguments.
How should I refer to this site?
PrevNode LinkNextYou can call it “Shlomi Fish’s Homepage”, “Shlomi Fish’s Homesite”, “Shlomi Fish’s personal web site”, or “shlomifish.org”. Some wrong ways to refer to it are:
“Your blog” - it is not a blog and I have more than one blog and site.
“shlomifish” or “ShlomiFish” - Shlomi Fish (with capital letters and a space) happens to be my name as written in Latin letters, and I’m a flesh-and-blood individual and more than just this site. It just happens that I picked the appropriate domain for that.
Do you want any new Internet/DNS domains?
PrevNode LinkNextCurrently no, given "he who proliferates possessions, proliferates worries". I have already bought several domains that have become under-used, and newer domains may confuse the visitors of my sites.
Why is this website in English? Why is it not in Hebrew?
PrevNode LinkNextFor several reasons:
There are many more English speakers (either as their mother tongue or as a secondary language) than Hebrew speakers. So I’m reaching a bigger target audience by writing in English.
Most native Hebrew speakers (i.e: Israelis) can read English well enough to understand my English writing. So most of the target audience for writing stuff in Hebrew will benefit from it very little.
I find it more comfortable and faster to type in English and express myself in writing using English for most types of writing (some stories I’m writing being an exception).
I often use a lot of tech jargon or slang, which is more difficult to translate to Hebrew.
That put aside, if you wish to translate a piece I wrote to any other language (including Hebrew), feel free to do so. I contributed some Hebrew translations to some English articles that other people originated, and also translated some texts I wrote in Hebrew to English.
Note that I’m using Commonwealth English on this site. Partly because I think that’s what Israelis are supposed to use, partly because I have been somewhat British-oriented, and partly because it feels nicer to use an uncommon spelling. I am still using US English spelling for source code and for technical documents, though.
My thoughts are that both the British spelling and the American spelling (and their common subset), are inconsistent and confusing, but I have to make a choice of some sort.
How much time do you spend on this site?
PrevNode LinkNextA lot. I spent several hundreds of hours on the site, possibly several thousands. While the pages of this site were originally just a collection of hand-maintained HTML pages, they were then converted to use Website Meta Language, and converted to have a common look and feel, a style that’s hopefully semantic, converted to use valid XHTML markup (XHTML 1.1 for the while); some navigation aids were added, etc.
All of the source code for the site is available online in various places. I’ve prepared a top-to-bottom document on how to compile the site from scratch, but the CI scripts lie less. Some of the hand-crafted code was released as the Latemp static site generator or various assisting CPAN modules under an open-source license.
I am still working on the site, both by adding new content and attractions, by revising or correcting existing ones, by making it more usable, or by trying to publicise new attractions in various online resources.
Recently (November 2019) I converted the main pages of the site from Website Meta Language to Template Toolkit, which is faster and less quirky, and also implemented better caching for the talks' slides.
What can you tell me about this site’s history?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step and continues with many subsequent small steps.
My homesite started from a small number of static HTML pages kept on the server of my workplace back then (Smart Link - smlink.com). It had the address http://www.smlink.com/~shlomif/, now inactive, where shlomif was my username on ibm.net back then (which ended up becoming my general unofficial ID). We hosted the server behind our Point-to-Point connection, which I can retrospectively tell was not a very good idea. Moreover, we had to create the alias in IIS specifically for me to put stuff there.
I recall that I had the Aphorisms collection with a few jokes I originated, as well as the report about the algorithmic solution to the Toggle Squares puzzle which I had sent to its originator (with whom I was corresponding at the time). And it also had a rudimentary pageful of links, and a bio.
When I became a student in the Technion, I moved my site to its undergraduate server at the address http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ . There I added more and more resources to the site. Here is the site as of 1998. I had a limited quota there, and when I got an account on “vipe”, a server managed by the students, I hosted part of my home site there as well, as http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ . The two parts of the site had cross-links to one another.
Eventually, I was about to graduate and so moved the t2.technion.ac.il part of my homesite, first to shlomif.il.eu.org (a free hostname, which ended up causing too many DNS problems), and then to www.shlomifish.org which is where it has been residing until now. In the process, I converted all of the main pages to use Website Meta Language and what would eventually become Latemp. This has enabled the site to have a common look and feel, a nice CSS stylesheet, a navigation menu and other navigation aids and other nice features.
Eventually I realised that the vipe server has too much down time (due to problems at the Technion’s network) and moved all of its content over to the www.shlomifish.org domain.
Throughout all this time, many resources were added to the homesite: software, essays, stories, artwork, presentations, puzzles, and more information about myself. I also now maintain a large number of blogs and sites for my projects, as well as sites I volunteered to maintain. I really like the way the web allows me to express myself, and to communicate using text, hypertext, and other types of media.
Even more recently, I've been writing more and more on social media outlets. There’s a list of my accounts for many social media and user-generated-content sites on every page of my home site.
In case you’re interested in setting up a personal web site of your own, I wrote an essay about it, which you can read.
Is www.shlomifish.org a blog?
PrevNode LinkNextThe short answer is that www.shlomifish.org is a good, old-fashioned, Web 1.0-style, home site - not a weblog/blog/online journal. Despite all that, my web site is fairly modern in its client-side technology and its look-and-feel should be usable and attractive enough. I have several blogs and am not opposed to the concept, but a classic web site has many advantages. For more information, see:
Update: (February 2021) I recently decided that it is not a worthwhile battle to insist that it is not a blog.
Why are you using XHTML (including XHTML5)? XHTML was depracated!
PrevNode LinkNextIt was/is not. XHTML5 is supported by all major web-browsers, including recent versions of MSIE. Please get your facts straight, and don't be provocative.
Also see:
Why are you using XHTML 1.1 for many pages on your site while serving them as “text/html”?
PrevNode LinkNextUpdate: (November 2019) I am now serving mostly XHTML5 pages and also serving them as application/xml+xhtml
.
I feel that validating against an XHTML schema makes my code cleaner and less buggy, because I need to have closing tags, as well as use a trailing “/” for standalone tags, etc. I also find the additional XHTML 1.1 restrictions to be a good idea.
Therefore I decided to make XHTML 1.1 the default doctype for the pages on my site. The reason I’m serving them as
text/html
is because Microsoft Internet Explorer does not handleapplication/xml+xhtml
properly, and I’d rather not needlessly discriminate against people who still use it (possibly against their will).I realise that it stands against the XHTML standard, but I’m not a standards purist, and want to be a bit pragmatic in still supporting Explorer. Note that some pages in the Math-Ventures section end with the
.xhtml
suffix and are served as XHTML because they contain MathML.
Is everything you say here true? Should I take it seriously?
PrevNode LinkNextThe answer is that not everything that I wrote, quoted and/or placed on my homepage and on other kinds of Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) mediums is still something I agree with (i.e: I changed my mind since then), or should be taken too seriously (i.e: may be amusing or thought provoking but isn’t really something I agree with), or that should be taken as an unbreakable rule (i.e: because such works are usually guidelines rather than something that should be taken as gospel). So please take them with a grain of salt, and apply your judgement.
Naturally, it does not help that I often omit the dates of creation and last update from a resource, and that I sometimes neglect to add a “Recent Update” note at the top of the page when it becomes irrelevant. If you have the necessary technical skills, you can peruse the pages’ history in the version control repository.
Bill Gates admitted that he said some stupid things and some wrong things
too. Also note the Hegelian dialectic (= Thesis → anti-thesis → synthesis).
Are the historical descriptions accurate?
Node LinkFirst of all, note that I often base my conclusions on limited data and gut feeling. Furthermore, I often find it necessary to modernise and idealise the historical or imaginary (or real-life) people or events, due to our world's values and mine progressing.
Otherwise, note that per the classic film Rashomon and my own experience, different people remember past events differently.
How many visitors/hits/uniques/etc. does this site get per month?
PrevNode LinkNextPlease don't ask me that, and that's not because I can't tell you that - it's because I don't think it matters too much. This is the same kind of penis envy (= “my $THINGY is bigger than yours”) and false machoflops/etc. competitions, and I care little for stuff like that. I'm now trying to work on creating more and more good content, enhancing the site usability better, and working on better publicity - both using Internet-based media and using real-world networking - and don't have the energy to spend time on silly statistics.
Why isn’t this site hosted using HTTPS/SSL?
PrevNode LinkNextUpdate: (November 2019) This site now uses HTTPS.
For several reasons:
The site does not require registration, and nothing here can be modified using a web interface. As a result, HTTPS is unnecessary.
HTTPS incurs some bandwidth and roundtrip overhead.
HTTPS prevents pages from being cached.
HTTPS requires a more capable hosting account than what I need or can afford to actively maintain.
You can mirror the site using
wget --mirror
if you care about "privacy".
Can you please delete offensive/blasphemous/derogatory stuff that appears on your site?
PrevNode LinkNextThe simple answer to that question is: no. I speak my mind and express myself using the words in the English language that I find appropriate. Moreover, I think that deliberately removing text and other content from Web sites is the modern-day equivalent to burning books, which as Heinrich Heine predicted, eventually leads to burning people (which in modern times usually only amounts to blocking them from speaking on an Internet subforum). So I'm not going to do it unless absolutely necessary.
As noted elsewhere on this F.A.Q., I have a strong stance against political correctness fanaticism. Furthermore, as the old tale of “The miller, his son, and the donkey” demonstrates, trying to comply with everyone's whims regarding what they disapprove of in this site, is a slippery slope, that will lead to a lot of content removed.
For more information, see:
Note that I’m open to adding visible notes at the tops of individual pages with updates, corrections, or saying that I no longer approve of their content. But this is assuming I agree with the criticism.
Do you link to your site to drive in traffic?
PrevNode LinkNextMany people whom I gave links to the various resources on my site, accused me of linking to them in order to drive in traffic for my site. First of all, I should note that it sounds like what I call a “conspiracy hypothesis” where one tries to formulate an ulterior motive explanation instead of assuming purity of intents.
That put aside - what will driving traffic to my site, buy me exactly? I don't get paid for each visitor or "unique hit" or whatever, and the Project Wonderful ads that used to be on my site were not pay-per-click, but rather pay-per-time (and now are no longer present after Project Wonderful announced that they will stop operating). While I admit I’d like my site to be as popular as possible, the real reason why I link to pages there is because they are relevant to the discussion at hand. If you’re too envious of me linking to my site, then please stop and get your own site which you can start populating with interesting content to your heart’s content. Moreover, you can use my site as a starting-point by forking its public version-control repository.
Why do you advertise/“spam”/“self-promote” pages from your sites?
Node LinkNextFirst of all note that it is "ableism" as I tend to link to my sites/blogs/domain a lot due to a combination of hypomania and slow typing due to hand paralysis. A lot of people think of blindness or deafness as the only disabilities, but there are many more, including bipolar disorder, Schizophrenia, and even lacking or non-native knowledge of English and other languages. Some Haredi Jews locally block YouTube, due to a Jewish Law prohibition on men hearing female vocalists.
I believe "anti-self-promotion" is a moral fashion popularised by reddit that was not present on Slashdot, or Freecode / Freshmeat, (and still isn't) and which I'll do as much as I can to kill:
Chuck Norris was challenged to fight the world, and accepted. He bet on himself, won, and collected the bet money.
Moreover, some subreddits do not enforce it either, and it makes even much less sense on interactive, real-time, chats.
Also note that the pages on my sites usually do not require registration or login, whitelisting client-side JavaScript or web ads, and they are friendly to lynx, and wget/etc. users. This tweet by me reads:
Dear Mr. Fear, go to hell! You have both crippled my body ( reference ) and made anti-"self-promotion" a trend to stifle my online forum presence. Well, I disbelieve all your lies and am not afraid of being banned.
The verb "to spam" has several meanings and many people equivocate them in order to censor me.
Furthermore, like Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead I believe in karma, and that being nasty, dishonest, unkind, and not generous, to people can bite you further down the road (while being kind, honest, respectful, and generous, returns seven folds). buu almost got himself killed due to frequent online chat hostility and use of IRC force (kicks, devoices, or bans). In addition, a former boss of mine who used to walk in the middle of the roads (hubris) in Gush Dan, got badly injured in a car accident.
(Note that I generally don't need the fear of retaliation to try to be honest and noble to my fellow men. This is because I enjoy being noble. )
Do you use your sites to collect IP addresses?
PrevNode LinkNextI rarely go over the monthly reports of the log analysers, to say nothing of looking at the raw web server logs. If you still don't believe me, you can try using Tor or similar, in order to browse them.
And frankly, these conspiracy hypotheses are ridiculous.
Do you use your sites to serve malware?
PrevNode LinkNextWorse: my pure-ASCII URLs consist of 100% magnetic monopoles! 😉
Seriously now: the pages on my sites usually do not require registration or login, whitelisting client-side JavaScript or web ads, and they are friendly to lynx, and wget/etc. users.
Why do you quote yourself e.g.: on IRC and on E-mail signatures?
PrevNode LinkWell, Peter Ustinov expresses having had a resistance to quote what he previously has uttered or wrote in the preface to a book where he compiled some of his favourite of himself and/or most memorable quotes. Many people think I'm narcisstic. I think I'm narcisstic. Even very narcissistic. I am trying to curb it, but there is a limit to what I can do.
While I agree that you should be critical of yours and other older works, often "old (for some value of old)", text [and source code] is still good enough. And then there are "retro" jokes/technologies that people can find funny again.
How is this site generated? Which CMS (Content Management System) are you using?
PrevNode LinkNextMost of the site is comprised of static HTML web pages, which are uploaded to the web-site as they are, after being generated using templates, data, and programs. The site’s sources are public and kept in a public version control repository, which also contains some automated tests and makes use of a continuous integration service.
In modern web developer jargon, one can say I use a custom static site generator (SSG). The blanket licence for the sources is CC-by-nc-sa for texts, and the ASL 2.0 for code.
While I am not ashamed of the site’s sources, they have undergone through a long history and legacy. I remain a big fan of static site generation, but there are probably some better approaches out there for that. Furthermore, often it is simpler to just write something of your own using a good preprocessor or a template system, a good build system and some code glue. However, for me, converting to something else would be too time-consuming, and I've already found some faults in some existing popular static site generators that I tried.
You can find a partial list of technologies that have been used for it.
Some people asked if I am running a content management system ("CMS") on my hosting's web-service, and the answer is "no". I am not running WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, or whatever. As far as the web-server is concerned, my site is static files that are served directly from the filesystem. Moreover, these files contain substantial amounts of repetitive markup and code.
Is this site written in Perl?
PrevNode LinkNextSee above - most of the site is generated using code and data and is served as static content on the server. There are about three CGI scripts written in Perl 5 using CGI-Minimal, or in Python using Bottle.py but they do not serve most of the content.
It is true that I make use of a lot of Perl code to generate the site's content, but the site's source code is not limited to Perl, and this code does not run on the web server, nor is required to serve most of it.
I believe the CGI scripts are:
Why do some of the server-side scripts have a “.cgi” extension?
PrevNode LinkNextI picked it as an implementation language-agnostic extension, to make the web-server's configuration easier. I don't know whether they are being run as CGI or a different technology in practice. I also do not care too much, as long as they run fast enough, which seems to usually be the case so far.
I found some broken links on one of your sites. Should I report them to you?
PrevNode LinkNextPlease do not report broken links. It is the nature of the web that links get broken and it is part of what makes it work. Moreover, I've had this site for many years, and it is natural that some of the links have become stale. Sometimes I have nothing to do about it but wait. As a result, dealing with these broken-hyperlinks-reports has become quite frustrating due to their frequency.
Please don't waste my time E-mailing me about them.
This site loads so quickly. What is your secret?
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all, note that I do not consider myself an expert on load time optimisations, and you may be able to find better advice elsewhere using web searches.
That put aside, here are some factors that may contribute to this:
Some of it has to do with my web hosting, currently HostGator. While not perfect, I am quite happy with them, and can recommend them for shared hosting.
It is possible the site does not receive a lot of traffic for a variety of reasons (not sure).
The website is mostly static and served from the server's hard disk directly without potentially costly server-side scripting.
I avoid loading unnecessary JavaScript codes and other resources from other sites (with some possible exceptions.).
I enabled server-side gzip/deflate/etc. compression.
XHTML/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all being minified. See HTML minifier for HTML, Go minifiers for SVG, and UglifyJS for JavaScript.
I use common external stylesheets, script files, and images, instead of embedding them on every page.
PNG images are compressed using OptiPNG ; SVG images are used as well.
Moreover, I recently started to increasingly make use of the WebP format, whose files tend to be smaller than PNG and JPEG ones, and look better and crispier than JPEG.
I sometimes remove various embellishments of the site, that while seemed a good idea or were one in the past, are no longer needed.
The navigation menu is partly populated after the page load by using an XMLHttpRequest (or so-called "AJAX") call to a static JSON file.
I sometimes reduce the size of the HTML markup by using wrapper tags and child or descendent CSS combinators. Moreover, adding CSS classes or
id="…"
attributes to existing tags can help even more.I use webpack to remaster jQuery-UI’s distribution, and reduce its size.
Some factors may play against the site's responsiveness. For example:
Use of XHTML instead of HTML.
Use of valid markup.
Use of jQuery and jQuery-UI. I see them as desirable Evils out of convenience.
My policy for my sites to be as usable as possible with JavaScript/etc. unavailable.
Also see:
Why does the site look old?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, the site's old fashioned look may be part of its charm, and kind-of lets it stand out from every Bootstrap Website ever. That put aside, feel free to submit pull-requests, patches, or CSS fragments if you think they will improve matters.
Why is the site’s markup not formatted nicely?
PrevNode LinkNextSome web developers told me they like to keep the markup they emit properly formatted and indented. I dislike doing that because:
It may harm its load time.
May provide users who look at it the illusion that it is the ultimate, editable/patch-able source code. I already received one patch written directly against the generated page of one of my sites, which was not immediately usable for me.
People are unlikely to use my site's markup to learn web technologies. For this, I recommend other resources.
The ultimate sources used to generate the markups are kept properly formatted, and are human-readable and editable, in public version-control repositories, so it's not as if I keep my code non-indented.
Keeping the served markup properly formatted may be harder than simply minifying it, and the proper formatting may vary according to taste.
Just like we often compile and link source codes to binary executables and libraries, (even if the source code is publicly available), so we can think of minifying web markups as compiling them in order to improve the user experience. That does not imply I do that in order to obscure the inner mechanisms of the software.
Also see:
"Perfectionism" post on Joel on Software - cites formatted HTML as an example.
Does this site have a public Git repository (on GitHub / GitLab / etc.)?
PrevNode LinkNextYes, it does. See:
The main GitHub repository (the build process clones some sub-repositories).
Where is this site hosted?
PrevNode LinkNextMy web hosting is currently HostGator. I use their shared hosting offering in order to ease the maintenance burden. "Shared hosting" is as opposed to a VPS or a dedicated server. That is: I am given ssh/rsync/.htaccess/CGI/PHP/perl5, but no root (= the UNIX "superuser").