Running Weblogs with Slash

Foreword

When asked to write this introduction I immediately tried to think of a good way to get out of it. Years of running Slashdot has crippled my brain, rendering it incapable of writing anything longer than a single paragraph. Perhaps a nice 20-pt. font would solve this problem! I also considered just using the same sentence 50 times, but I suspected that someone might bother reading it before it went to press, and then the jig would be up. It’s awfully hard to fake writing a couple of pages, and I’m nothing if not lazy. But I hope that my laziness will have a bit of a payoff for you at some point.

More than four years ago I registered a domain name. Being the cocky young lad that I was, I decided that I would register the most unpronounceable name I could think of. I didn’t know exactly what I would be putting on my site, but I knew that whatever it was, it was going to be a creation purely for the age of the Internet. And part of that was making the name itself a joke (something unpronounceable). I registered what seemed like an appropriately pompous name and proceeded to phase 2 of my master plan.

Owning a domain name has responsibilities besides remembering to turn relay off on your MX and paying your registration fee every year. But even more important then being the lucky recipient of 50 daily pieces of spam addressed to root@ or webmaster@ is the task of populating your domain name with exciting content. Since I had very little of that, I set about creating a tangled ...