At just under nine years since I started blogging, I'm changing this blog to a new name. There's no huge story here, just a vague but growing dissatisfaction with My Faults My Own as my brand for personal writing.

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I took the name My Faults My Own in August 2013, in homage to Vi Hart's video Doodling in Math Class: Connecting Dots, particularly the quote:

Here's the thing about connecting dots. You can have all the steps laid out for you, taking whatever next step is easiest and closest and be sure of what you're getting the whole time. This way is safe and comfortable.

Or, you can try new ways of connecting dots and not know what you're going to get. Maybe it will be something great, maybe it will fail. And when it fails it will be your fault. You can't blame anyone else, not mathematics or the system or the check-boxes.

But if I am to have faults, I would rather they be my own.

I continue to believe that {intellectual self-ownership, independence, creativity} are effectively necessities for strong analytical ability, which you very much do want to have on your side.

But I also have other intellectual principles, and elevating this particular one to pride of place in the title has stopped seeming right to me. My faults are my own, I would rather they be my own, and I expect that I'll believe that approximately forever. I'm well settled into that stance, and I'm not going back. But I don't blog under Water is Wet or Sky is Blue, and blogging under a declaration of independence borrowed from another...eh, it doesn't quite

My Faults My Own (and other rossry.net and r-y.io subdomains) are now available over HTTPS, with certificates from Let's Encrypt. (cf. https://blog.rossry.net/https)

The setup took nontrivial effort, so I've narrated it here for my or your future reference. I don't think there's anything technically novel here, and there may even be an HTTPS-setup guide for 2019 somewhere else that dominates mine for usefulness, but there wasn't one easy-to-find enough that I found it, so here we are.

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First, the dramatis personae:

Let's Encrypt (hereafter "LE"), a project of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, issues free TLS (née SSL) certificates; they recommend that site administrators with shell access use the LE client Certbot, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

My Faults My Own, and other rossry.net and r-y.io subdomain services, are happily hosted by Digital Ocean (this turns out not to matter), running nginx on Ubuntu 14.04. (Certbot supports many other servers and OS setups as well; I'm listing my specifics here just as context for the following narration, especially as this combination specifically has some tricky issues.)

My domain registrar and DNS provider, Namecheap, sadly does not really support Certbot's automated DNS-based authentication (necessary for a "wildcard certificate", which will cover all of *.rossry.net), and I don't want to manually mess with DNS records every 90 days to get new certificates issued.

Fortunately, joohoi/acme-dns is a lightweight DNS server intended specifically to help automate ACME DNS challenges, and even comes with a certbot hook by the author. The dns-01 challenge protocol of the Automatic Certificate Management Environment standard involves setting _acme-challenge.

Amongst all of the large transitions happening in my life about now, I found it necessary to move my blog server from "some borrowed machine on the Harvard network" to a real-adult location, like "the cloud". After asking a few friends for recommendations, I decided to rent server time from Digital Ocean, at least as a stopgap measure until the end of the summer, when I'd be able to pick out my own internet plan.

I'm glad to report that I couldn't be happier with DO's service. Spinning up a new virtual server and migrating Faults to it was probably the easiest piece of system administration that I've done. I gave them my credit card number, told them that I wanted a $5/mo Ubuntu box, and within two minutes, I had an IP address and login details in my email inbox. Then it was a simple matter of copying RSA keys, an rcp on ~/web/, a separate rcp to handle /etc/nginx/sites-available/, a few apt-get installs and npm installs, a call to node ~/web/ghost/index.js, and a DNS edit at Namecheap (my domain registrar)...and I was done. No gotcha problems. No Google searches that ended up in random Linux users' forums. The experience felt exactly like DO's billing: Simple cloud computing, built for developers.

10/10; would use again.

(It's worth noting that Ghost

I published 72 posts in 2015, with the first on January 1 and the last on November 18, for an average of 1.6 posts/week on that interval, up 70% from 2014's 0.9 posts/week. These 72 posts accounted for about 47% of the 152 posts published through December 2015.

According to Google Analytics (which ignores my pageviews), I saw an average of 57 views per day, with non-homepage views-per-day up 97% from the last half of 2014 (before which I don't have GA records). September 18 (when 2015's overall most-viewed post was published) was the single-day high, with more than a thousand more views than any other day in Faults history. GA thinks that 41% of all sessions originated from Facebook.

tl;dr I am writing posts and people are reading my blog. I'm pretty happy with these numbers.

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The ten My Faults My Own posts published in 2015 with the most total pageviews were: (in ascending order)

• A Liberal Critique -- in which I attempt to explain why calling out harmful discourse is especially important when the people I'm calling out are on the left.
• October 28 Links: Thinkers, Statesmen, Economists, Doctors -- The only linkwrap to make the list; no, I'm not sure why, either.
• Putting money where my mouth is and Okay, you can stop it now., in that order. -- A two-part rant in frustration with the entirely ugh-y renaming of my school.
• Yes, you should hire college-educated computer scientists -- contra David Gelernter, who looks to hire only "people who taught themselves to code in high school and still can't get enough of it."
• Something About Bernie -- In

Unless you're using Lynx, you've probably noticed a new theme for the site. Love it? Hate it? Let me know in the brand-spanking-new comments section! (If the comments are broken, let me know by email.)

It's my own design, built from the ground up, and I'm still tweaking it around the edges, so I appreciate any general feedback on the visual design, whether positive or negative, as well as bug notices. I've been hacking at it for long enough that you should assume that any bug you find is not something I'm aware of yet.

Known bugs so far:

• Scrolling on mobile is jerky. If your browser refuses to scroll at all, or if your scrolling is messed up in a desktop browser, do let me know.
• The site icon has reverted to the Ghost default. I'll eventually put a new one up, once I get around to drawing it.
• I'm still working on optimizing load/render time, so consider that a known issue.

...and with that, we're back from hiatus! Expect a proper post first thing tomorrow. (I'd like to do a writeup of the theme-development process, but the first post won't be that.)

As you may have noticed, the front page of the blog has changed. Ever since the transition to Ghost in May of last year, I've been using Sheet by Brian O'Keefe as a theme, but I decided recently that there were a few little tweaks I'd like to make.

So, here we are, about three days of hacking later. Two columns, a few special boxes in the upper-right, and a whole mess of responsive layout design (thanks, Pure.css!) -- let me know what you think! Sound off in the comments below, drop me an email, or whatever. I'm pretty happy with the individual post/page layout in Sheet, though, so I think I'll leave it be for the time being.

Happy holidays, all, and may you always have projects to keep your fingers busy.

I've decided to move my blog from the Blogger platform to Ghost, hosted here, where I can control more of the fiddly bits. I've copied over all content from the old Blogspot site, but future posts will only be made here.

Welcome, and cheers!