From my diary

Over the last few days I have been working on the static HTML files of the Tertullian Project.  My objective is to improve its metrics in the search engine race, but I have found much else to do. I’ve enabled HTTPS, as seems trendy today (and you get marked down for not having it).

Most of the files were in ANSI format.  Many contained strange characters, a product of the very spotty support for anything but US 7-bit ascii, even today.  Various meta tags have been removed; others will be added.

At the moment I am grepping the files for non-ascii characters, whatever they happen to be, and fixing files.  I had not remembered that I have a letter by Lupus of Ferrières online, until my grep informed me that the e-grave in his name was corrupt.  Likewise an old favourite about a “Ramshackle Room on the Banks of the Cam” had mysteriously acquired corruption.

A kind correspondent let me know that, while doing this, I had disabled the Roman cult of Mithras pages.  This was mainly because a symlink had vanished; but I spent a stressful hour this morning before I discovered that a .htaccess file needed to be copied also.

A few days ago one of my backup hard drives started to make a squealing sound while idling.  I took this seriously; any odd noises from hard drives mean that failure is imminent.  What annoyed me was that the drive was only 3 months old; and bought to replace a drive which did the same only 6 months earlier.  So last week I bought a (third!) replacement from Amazon, which was defective on arrival, and went straight back.  I then bought a different drive from a shop locally.  But it is not a trivial process to back up in full the terabytes of data on my PC, and it is still running as I speak.

Ah well.  On with it!