Ree’s musings

Earlier today I spent some time in a waiting room with open wifi. DS Browser to the rescue! (Would have gleefully blogged a bit—I'm posting from my DS! Geekgasm!—but by the time I was done with my morning routine of checking email, Twitter, and RSS feeds, my wait was over.)

The wifi came with an AUP specifying that activity was monitored and anyone accessing objectionable material would be cut off. I'm not used to categorising my internet activity as objectionable or not.
Tales of MU was right out. I saw in my feed reader that Mutt had posted an article about a fifth gender; after some consideration, I decided that the religiously-affiliated medical center might possibly object to that, and left it to read at home.

Should I risk accessing hellhound.net to check Pro and Twine? "Hell" in the URL + religious organisation monitoring wifi = I can check those later, to stay on the safe side.

The experience leaves me wondering why my life works this way. Am I a strong, healthy individual to be unruffled by materials that are sexual, non-Christian, or based in a non-binary gender system? Or I am blasé, unable to see any worldview incompatible with mine? Should I be more aware of "objectionable content" in my life?

In more banal news, Ree hungry. That problem is more pressing and simpler to fix, so yeah.

I was going to ask for reader opinions, but I think I wouldn't glean much, so you're getting a rambling info-dump instead.

I run smallwood.cjb.net, a reviews site for user-created Dink Smallwood levels. By "run," I mean that I've neglected it for years. My free website host is closing up shop next month. Maybe I should just let my little archive site die at long last, but I've recently discovered a small CMS that wouldn't suit any of my other sites, but it would be perfect for this. I'd really like to play with an actual CMS that doesn't take up thirty smegging megs of filespace, plus database space, plus any user uploads.

The CMS I'm looking at is Pixie, which is about one meg, zipped. It's a young project. The current version won't let me nest my pages in subdirectories, meaning I can't easily replace my other sites with a Pixie-powered version, but it looks almost perfectly suited to running my Dink site.

A free web host wouldn't let me install a CMS, but if I forgo file downloads in favour of linking to offsite downloads, I can make my Dink site fit within my increasingly full paid webspace. Then I get to maintain the links page and updates blog as proper modules within the CMS instead of using Notepad or cPanel to manage everything. cPanel is not a CMS, no matter how much I misuse it like one.

I'm not sure it's worth keeping my oft-neglected site around just to play with a CMS. On the other hand, I'd get a better feel for the system by using it on a live site with pre-existing content than I would by entering ipsum text into a few spots.

I have two weeks until my current free host dies. That gives me some time to figure out if I want to use my new CMS toy, a system of server-side includes, or a different free host instead of my paid one. It'll keep till after supper.