Twenty years ago Tuesday, I created the newsgroup rec.humor.funny as a moderated place for posting the funniest jokes on the net, as chosen by the editor. In light of that anniversary, I have written up a bit of history of the creation of RHF. From there you can also find links to pieces I wrote earlier about the attempt to ban RHF and how RHF led to my creation of ClariNet.

One reason people may pay a bit more attention to this anniversary is I think that RHF, with its associated web site has a claim at being the world’s longest still-running “blog.” Of course, there is much debate about the origins of blogging, and there are various contenders based on what definition you put to the word.

I provide more detailed examination of those definitional questions and the other contenders on a page about the world’s oldest blog. In short, I contend that a blog is something that is:

• Serial (a series of publications over time)
• Done with a personal editorial voice (rather than being news reporting)
• On the world wide web

While most agree with that last point (since personal journals, published diaries and columns existed long before computers) many forget that when Tim Berners-Lee defined what the web was, he was very explicit about including the many media and protocols he was tying together with HTML and HTTP, including USENET, Gopher, E-mail and the rest. So the web dates back well before HTML, and so does the weblog.

I personally point to mod.ber, a short-lived moderated newsgroup from 1983 as the first blog. It was clearly the boing-boing of its day. But it doesn’t exist, so RHF may get to claim the title.

As you will know if you have followed RHF, while I continue to publish it and provide the software and systems, I only edited it for the first 5 or so years. After that Maddi Hausmann took over, and in 1995, Jim Griffith took the reigns to this day. He, however, is ready to retire shortly and we’re looking for a replacement — a note will be posted in RHF and here with more details after the anniversary.

As you’ll see in the histories, the decision to start RHF changed my life in sweeping ways. It was one of those junctures that Clarence from “It’s a wonderful life” could change if he wanted to show me a different path.

Happy 20th Birthday rec.humor.funny.

A few weeks ago, my site got hacked. The attacker inserted an iframe pointing to a malware site into most of my html pages. That of course is bad, but the story doesn’t end there. (I should of course have upgraded my OS from the ancient one my hosting company gave years ago, but they don’t really support that, and feel an upgrade consists of rebuilding from scratch.)

I cleaned out the entire site and searched for any remnants of the bad link. Having done this I thought all was well. However, as it turns out while the ideas.4brad.com domain and other domains were clear, the 4brad.com domain, which I don’t use for anything, still had a web server on it, pointing at a different directory far from where I keep my own web sites. (I try to never put my stuff in system directories.)

Unfortunately google, for unknown reasons, looked at 4brad.com, even though there are no links to it anywhere on the web. And found the placeholder page, with hacked link in it. From there it declared the entire site, including ideas.4brad.com, to be a malware site. I think that’s a bug, since there were never any malware links on ideas.4brad.com pages — this is a drupal site, and while the hacker’s script attempts to modify PHP scripts, it did not do so correctly, and just broke them. Running linux, I didn’t see the malware hacks on the other sites where they made the changes, but found them soon enough and removed them for now.

Alas, that means for some time people have been directed away from this blog by google. It shows up in search results, but you can’t actually click on the results, and there are warnings that going to the site may harm your computer (you get these warnings even on non-windows computers, which is reasonable, I guess, if incorrect.) I’ve asked the site stopbadware.org, which Google teams with, to confirm the hacks are gone, and now I have to rush out to rebuild the site from a fresh install. Sigh.

Update: Google reacted to the cleanup of 4brad.com very quickly and no longer lists the domain as unsafe. I did file a review request with stopbadware.org — perhaps they are much faster than they let on.

I’m shopping for hosting. I think I will upgrade to dedicated hosting, even though virtualized hosting has its merits. As I wrote before it would be great if MySQL could be virtualized independently of the OS. The ideal marriage would be a virtualized linux with access to sharable, non-virtualized services like web serving and database. The trick is memory. A typical virtual host will have 16 copies of MySQL and 16 copies of Apache and 16 copies of PHP or similar running on it. Because virtual machines don’t truly understand how much memory they have, or see the paging of the underlying OS, they can’t manage memory as well. But their ability to burst in unused capacity is a big win.