Posts tagged “web servers”

• Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
• I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
• A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
• Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
• Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
• Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
• On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.

Does anybody know of any way to have IIS automatically restart itself every few hours? Do tell.

I have MovableType running now and this blog, Works in Progress is a MovableType blog! I’m using DreamHost as my web host, and thought – on the off-chance that anyone reads anything here ever – that I’d note some things specific to DreamHost. The most important thing to note is that under DreamHost a user has an account root. This is where you should place your MovableType db directory.

I have several domains hosted at DreamHost, so when I connect using WS_FTP I start in my root account. That means I’m presented with a directory for each of the domains I have hosted there. Aside from some shell-specific variable files, this root directory only contains one directory for each domain hosted, and, now, my MovableType db directory.

The path to your root account at DreamHost is simply: /home/username/

So, assuming you name your db directory db, the DataSource variable in your mt.cfg file should read: DataSource /home/username/db

Obviously replace username with your DreamHost username.