2001/07/06

It was on my to-do list for many months -- revising the Ranchero Software site so it no longer appears that there is such a thing as Ranchero Software.

I kept the pages that were there, since there are some Frontier docs and other tidbits that shouldn't just disappear.

And now it's done.

It was surpisingly fun doing the work -- it's a Frontier-built site, just a very simple website framework site that renders to disk. It's rare that I get to build websites that way. I had forgotten how nice it is. I even wrote a new macro to generate the little breadcrumbs path at the top of most of the pages.

The Ranchero site is on my oldest server, an old Mac running WebSTAR. I noticed the creation date of the folder that contains all the content on that server:

Fri, Sep 8, 1995, 4:25 PM

Wow. Almost six years of hosting sites, mine and other people's.

Sure, some people have done it longer, but six years is a pretty long time in Web years.

"tinyshoe.gif"

Anyway, it feels good to say that the Ranchero site is done. I have no plans, and no need, to ever update those pages again. Sure, I'll keep the database around just in case, but I really don't expect to need it.

I'm so used to Web sites being perpetually "under construction" -- because that's the way they're supposed to be, they're supposed to be always changing and new. So it feels extra weird to have a finished site.

But, you know, in this case, I like it.

Ranchero Software was a raging success. Okay, not really, but sort of, if you look at it a certain way.

It ended in the black.

In other words, we did better than Jeff Bezos. We did better than lots of people -- you've heard all the stories. Ranchero didn't hemorrhage millions of dollars. Everyone gets more money back than what they put in.

Ranchero was run conservatively -- even in the crazy bubble days -- on sound business principles which I like to summarize as make a profit.

"tinyshoe.gif"

The Libera Manifesto. (Via Backup Brain.)

It's not just Get Info, it's Super Get Info. From Bare Bones Software.

I'm posting this minor tidbit in case anyone has the same problem as me and does a Google search.

Running Mailman and postfix, Mailman couldn't send mail -- it got an "All recipients refused" message with an error code of 111. (As listed in Mailman's smtp log.)

It turned out to be a problem in /etc/hosts -- localhost wasn't configured properly. So I added a line 127.0.0.1 localhost and suddenly the floodgates opened.