Next, the DNS for this site is now handled through Cloudflare, which means that this site is now fully available via HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate. So, small victories.

While running through the process of updating the blog, I noticed several things were broken and went ahead and fixed those:

• The “Site Version” link in the sidebar now properly links to the GitHub source repository.
• A long standing issue with pagination has been corrected by updating to the jekyll-paginate-v2 gem, and rewriting the appropriate liquid blocks.
  • Github-Pages does not support the v2 gem. Therefore, the site has been downgraded back to the v1 gem, and the liquid blocks were cleaned up based on trial and error.
• Related posts are now actually related! This is accomplished by iterating through tags at compile time and creating a list of related posts. While this may not always be accurate, it is far more accurate than the time based system jekyll uses by default.
• A small issue has been corrected with the header file used across pages. There was a typo that was generating invalid HTML. It didn’t cause any visible issues, but it was a problem all the same.
• The archive page now uses a new Liquid code block. This is to resolve the long standing </ul> problem, where the code would generate trailing closing tags.
• HTTPS links have been enforced across the board. I cannot promise the site that you visit will have a valid SSL certificate, but we will certainly try to redirect the connection over SSL now.

HTML proofer is still throwing a few errors related to my consistent use of the Introduction and Conclusion headers, but these are not actual errors.

• Even these errors have been fixed. HTMLProofer now returns a completely safe site.

I’m also in the process of going back through previous posts and cleaning up the YAML front matter. While this front-matter previously had very little impact on the site, it now can matter quite a lot with the way the related posts system works.

Analytics

Google Analytics are back. I understand that some people may not like being tracked, but at that point you should have an add or tracking blocker installed. I recommend looking at the Brave Browser, which is what I personally use, or installing uBlock Origin. The reason I have added this back to the blog is that I have noticed links to this blog appearing in various places over the web, and I would like to be able to detect how much traffic I am getting from these links.

I wholeheartedly understand if you disapprove of the use of Google Analytics. If anyone is able to suggest a better service, that collects less user data, please open an issue in the GitHub repository for this site. I will gladly change providers as long as the new one is also free.

Theme Updates

I forked the Lanyon repository and applied all the currently pending pull requests. This should keep everything up to date with the latest version of Jekyll. To make it easier for anyone else looking for that information, I created a new PR in the lanyon repository to my mergers. You can also find them under my GitHub site.

Fonts

Somehow the fonts on the site got nuked during the upgrade. They are back in place now.

Page Speed

The new updates have not yet been optimized. Previously I used Google’s page load speed thingy to optimize the site. Maintaining that by hand is one of the reasons the upgrade was so painful to implement. I’m looking for a way to automate the process the same way that I have currently automated the link tests that I run prior to a push. This will likely involve writing a new process in the Rakefile, so it will take some time. In the meantime, the only thing that is really being pulled is a few font files and the analytics script, so the load impact shouldn’t be too bad.

Organization

There is a weird issue between rendering the site on my local machine and the way GitHub pages renders it on their side. To solve this I created a new template and appended it to all the pages that should not appear in the sidebar. Hopefully this strikes a good balance between being able to use standardized templates, as well as ease of use. The new template simply imports the existing page template under a new name.

Images

While I am primarily focused on text on this blog, I have recently included a few images. These are also hosted on GitHub, so I cleaned up the way the image directory is laid out. This has impacted all of one image, but should make any expansion in the future much easier.

Liquid Changes

There was some issue with the way the Liquid on the Tags page was written. This has been corrected accordingly.

About Page

The about page has been correctly updated! My view on some of the listed issues has evolved in recent years. You will now find those things struckthrough with comments added underneath.

Future Improvements

There is still minifying, javascript inlining, and font work to be done to make the page run faster. Additionally, the tags page is simply a disaster. Between all of that and the project pages, there is still a lot left to be done. Hopefully, all will be accomplished in time.

Conclusion

Hopefully all of these changes make the site a bit more enjoyable to use. I do understand if the use of analytics bothers you. Please make an issue in the tracker, or if someone already has, comment accordingly. If there are enough people using this site that honestly care, I might consider removing the analytics while I do further research.

I believe I have now solved the font issue (woff files vs woff2 files), and I have completed all the setup of this system, including getting my ruby workflow transitioned. So, in theory, we will be able to get back to the good stuff here shortly.

I have recently joined a small game development startup with some very talented people, and was berated into using C++ for the game by the way this particular industry works, so you can expect some future posts about my frustrations with developing a cross platform game engine in C++.

The goal, for now, is to do the following:

• Write a post on backup software evaluation, and why I went with the software I did go with.
• Finish up the Icinga2 Tutorials that have driven quite a lot of traffic to this page.
• Write some stuff on game design.

So we will see how that works out. As always, thanks for reading.

P.S. I have decided that I don’t really like having analytics on this page, so over the next few days I am going to root through the code and remove them. Thank you for your patience.

I just spent the past thirty minutes going back and removing a number of the links that were in my posts up to this point. Nothing important, just links to Wikipedia or Man Pages, but after speaking with a few friends, I realized the links weren’t exactly as useful as I thought they were. In addition to this my build time on Travis-CI had hit about four minutes and all I have to build is about eight pages, so that’s absurd, and not really scalable. All the important links have been left in, along with any interesting or amusing ones.

If you are looking for the links, you can go into the github repository for this site, and look for the commits prior to “Automatic Commit: cleaning up links”.

This also helps to maintain my sanity, so there’s that. Fifty links in one article was causing me to worry quite a lot about dead links.

I spent about three hours on it before I finally went to bed. I even went as far as to spend five more dollars to purchase a 500MB token in order to see if maybe I was being penalized for using too much data in my throttled state, as I have been making use of aria2 to manage large downloads that would otherwise suffer from a mysterious decryption failure when I was downloading via HTTPS. Didn’t help.

This morning I bit the bullet and changed my LAN’s MTU from 1280 to 1500. You may be wondering why I refer to this as having to bite the bullet, since an MTU of 1500 is standard. Well, come to find out that PMTUD is broken on HughesNet. Something about what is done on the HughesNet side causes the packets to become too large. Now, IPv6 is supposed to handle this by sending ICMPv6 Type 2 “Packet too Large” notices to the end point. While debugging PMTUD the other day (about a week ago) I set up my firewall so that ALL ICMPv6 is allowed, rather than having to itemize the different types. Still, no good. I was getting silent failures that I had to use test-ipv6.com to resolve, and they still indicated packets were becoming too large for my connection. In a fit of irritation, I set my entire LAN to an MTU of 1280. Eureka, I have IPv6 functionality.

Obviously after last night, I can’t exactly use that solution anymore, for a reason I have yet to understand. So my MTU is set back to 1500, and without using HughesNet’s squid proxy (what they call web acceleration), IPv6 fails. Oh, I didn’t mention that did I? Yeah, their web acceleration lets IPv6 work. However, I run my own squid proxy, locally, which is even faster than theirs. It also saves me bandwidth. So I keep web acceleration off.

• Web Acceleration On = PMTUD works, IPv6 BUT I have double caching. Not good.
• Web Acceleration Off = IPv6 Fails. Not acceptable.

Just to see if I could get something reset in the modem, I even called tech support. The solution of “It is a problem with your LAN” was obvious, but still frustrating due to the issues described above. However, I am planning to reach out to their support today via social media, so I am pushing this article live, without links, just so I have something to refer to. I will come back to link to the major terms in this a little later. Wish me luck.