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Site Overhaul

My website is nearly old enough to vote.

I'm not joking; the first version of it went live inside my then-employer's intranet in late 1993. (I've still got it lying around somewhere — must dust it off one of these days.) This version, on antipope.org, has mutated but is largely unchanged since 1996, save for the addition of the blog some time in early 2000.

When your website has acne and hangs around pubs trying to get someone to buy it a pint, it's probably time to think about an overhaul. And so, the overdue overhaul is underway.

The first major change is this: your new entrypoint is www.accelerando.org.

I registered accelerando.org back in 2005, for the book of that name; it's been moribund since 2006. Don't worry about the content, I've still got it; what's new is that the www.domain redirects to this blog, and I'm planning over the next few months to gradually slide across the bits of stuff that I want to keep, while leaving antipope.org as a mostly-untouched historical relic.

The old blog entrypoint (www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/) will continue to work for the forseeable future, but there will be New Stuff showing up by and by if you enter via www.accelerando.org.

Update: Here's the old Accelerando site (in abbreviated form, but including the download links and the Tough Guide To The Singularity).

40 Comments

1:

Just let us know when the RSS feed is gonna switch. :-)

2:

Any thoughts on what tech you're going to use/not use for the new revision?

3:

David McBride: I'll be upgrading the current installation of Movable Type from 3.x to 4.x, and merging the two different 3.x installations on this server (Feorag's running on a different set-up!) but otherwise keeping the tech the same. I will not touch PHP with a barge-pole (it seems to be exploit central) and I won't be changing the look and feel of the blog much -- but the sidebar of links to buy my books will be replaced by a directory tree with stuff about each book, including online vendors, reviews, cover shots, and so on. I may even go the whole hog and structure it as a forest of per-book blogs, using this one as an aggregator and personal soapbox.

4:

Police State UK link duly updated :)

5:

I was a late adopter; Stringpage didn't appear until 1995. It moved to its own domain, got a CSS makeover, but a lot of the diagrams are still the original scans of hand-drawn figures. MUST fix that. Someday.

6:

You've lost the penguin.

7:

John: What penguin?

8:

So much for trying to escape the s-word. ;)

9:

But where will I go for all of my anti-papist propaganda?

10:

Thras: the Vatican seems to be doing a sufficiently good job of that this century, under Pope Palpatine the First.

11:

A Linux Penguin shows up beside the URL when I connect via antipope, but not via accelerando.

12:

Ahh, only saw the new abbreviated old accelerando site now. I'm really missing the 700 word article you mistakenly wrote for some magazine, that you had on the old site. That one gave some pretty good background to the writing of the story and I would really want to point anyone to it whom I recommend reading the book (or whoever wants a short description of what a dot-com was like).

That article makes the first 3 chapters of accelerando some of the best science fiction I remember reading. (The rest doesn't quite fit, because at that point I felt like the story finally lost touch with todays reality and the lost that feeling of the tech-going-mad rush that so pleasantly massaged my neurons up to there.)

13:

will the old rss feed start directing me here, or do I need to switch it?

14:

So, I assume the new site's interface will be entirely Flash-based, with the only actual visible text surrounded by blink tags for extra visibility and interactivity?

That's a shame, this is one of my favourite sites, and has been for a while not only because of the content, but because it loads so quickly compared to, just to point a quivering finger of rage, SLASHDOT (why, taco? why?).

This is a clean, minimalist, elegant setup here, Stross. Don't piss in the punch.

15:

tp1024: I added the short essay back in (it wasn't a mistake, believe me).

Dave: the RSS feed won't start redirecting, nor is there an RSS feed here yet -- www.accelerando.org is simply an alias, for the time being.

16:

So, we can assume that they'll be lots of Flash and CSS coming along soon with some Web 2.0 thingumygiggys ;)

17:

Dave @16: Yep, we'll soon be able to vote for which blog posts Charlie gets to put on the front page, and for which of 2^4 sections the posts get filed under.

Also, Charlie will write a new blog post every five minutes, each of which will be immediately hijacked by a global warming debate.

18:

Charlie, your new site better work well with CLI browsers or else :)

19:

Pope Palpatine the First? Uh-huh. And I was happy for a minute that you were finally getting away from a domain name that could be easily misread as a slur on a billion or so people. Some of whom buy your books.

Joking aside, "This is not an anti-Catholic hate site" -- right?

20:

Thras: I'm not a fan of any organized religion -- or rather, of any religious organization. Personal beliefs are one thing, but when there's a hierarchical organization pushing a consistent doctrine, and especially when they're trying to get their followers to implement the doctrine in law, that's something entirely different.

The previous pope did appalling damage to the fight against the AIDS pandemic by his refusal to sanction a compromise between their organization's religious doctrine and the exigencies of public healthcare. (Or by the refusal of the organization of which he was head -- I understand the distinction between the man and the office, but after 20+ years I'm inclined to hold the man responsible for the office's actions.) The current pope ... cheap shots aside, he seems to be an extreme reactionary and even more committed to the blind pursuit of doctrinal purity at the cost of human life. His statements on homosexual rights are reprehensible and abhorrent, his stance on AIDS prevention has contributed significantly to fifty million deaths, and at this point I don't care whether his theological beliefs are genuinely held -- I judge ideologies by their outcomes, and regardless of the good works of the Church, the outcomes in the late 20th and early 20th century include results that would qualify as genocide, if they were intentional. Ditto the doings of the Shi'ite clergy in Iran under the Ayatollah Khomenei and his successors: when you mix religious doctrine with politics, pluralism and tolerance go out of the window and the results are inevitably inhumane.

If the next pope decides to change direction, that'll be another matter. But given the way the last and current one have packed the college of cardinals, I'm not holding my breath.

21:

Gee, I had thought of asking what was with 'antipope' but figured it was either: Pretty self-explanatory, or One of those questions that you're tired of, and had addressed years ago. (and @20 don't let's get started on pius xii, not to mention the rest of their history.)

The penguin shows up in the adress box when I use firefox.

23:

James @ 21: in the Good Old Days before GoDaddy and co. you had to slip someone in the know a bundle of used fivers to get a domain name registered. Unfortunately for Charlie, both he and the someone were drunk when the deed was done, and in the morning he found that along with a hangover he was the proud possessor of the antipope domain rather than autopope.org (Automatic Bulls by dispensation).

24:

Just looked at the antipope-side bar and found /Wireless/ - what's that? Amazaon isn't especially helpful with info on it.

25:

Till: "Wireless" is a short story collection, coming in July (in place of my regular summer SF novel).

26:

Soon Lee@22 and Robert@23, Thanks for the link and summary. I somehow missed that page when I first came to the site a few years ago (and a couple years before I got the nerve to leave any comments).

27:

Bit of time on your hands when you wrote the Singularity guide, Charlie? I think you left of the bit where Bruce Sterling now writes self-referential fantasy wish-fulfillment for his legions of Slashdot-insightful-modding geek fans...

28:

Ah, the missing Penguin. I just noticed it myself. Charlie, you missed either a favicon.ico file or the equivalent tag on the home page itself.

29:

So, charlie@7 you are trying to deny that the new site runs on Windows Vista?

http://www.antipope.org/favicon.ico

Don't you just lurve Microsofts way of defining "standards".

30:

Hah, I had a cached icon in my browser. Now fixed.

The server feels like it runs Vista, but actually it's just a somewhat-gutless Atom box running Debian.

In the next year I hope to be upgrading the home setup from ADSL2 with static IP to VDSL -- at which point, once I've got significantly more than 2mbps outgoing bandwidth, the box may migrate in-house, to a Mac running OS/X Server. But not yet ...

31:

Whether Charlie meant to register it or not, "antipope" is hardly an anti-Catholic term anyway. It simply means a pope elected by a substantial dissident faction of the church hierarchy. There's not been any serious antipopes for quite a few centuries, but I believe that at some point in the late middle ages there were up to two or three antipopes in various parts of Europe at the same time.

32:

Any chance of pointing accelerando.org at the same IP please?

My w key is getting worn.

33:

Ric @32: ah, see, there I have a solution for you: use an unlabelled keyboard! Then you don't have to worry about certain keys becoming illegible due to overuse.

Yay for DasKeyboard, it rocks!

34:

Ric: not when I'm packing for a three week foreign trip.

35:

I love the fact your site hasn't changed since I first started lurking past in the late 90s :)

36:

no-www FAQ

But I suspect Charlie isn't keen to mess around with Apache configurations either before the trip.

37:

@31: there is an antipope right now, or at least there was one a few years ago, not sure if he died recently. He's a Spanish crazy guy that got ordained by some rogue bishop iirc.

38:

Your site will be old enough to vote, and if you can go another couple decades, it might be legally entitled to by then.

39:

...even scarier, it might be fully capable of doing so autonomously.

40:

Tim @39, are you sure it's not already!!!

Charlie... I can't hit accelerando.org today -(17/5) traceroute dies on the hop from antipope.org. I've also tried tunneling via a quantum entangled electron array, set up with a temporal address of today, from next tuesday and that doesn't work either. Go figure.

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This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on May 6, 2009 12:20 PM.

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