Some Website Housekeeping

I did some minor housekeeping related to my website this evening. There were a couple of loose ends that resulted from me moving servers. I had forgotten, or rather ignored the fact the banner ad in my site was completely broken. Instead of bringing up my ad server again, which had plenty of issues, I decided I’d go with AdBrite, which used to be called HTTP Ads and is run by the same folks who bring you F***ed Company. They have it set up so people can buy ads directly from them and run them on my website. They take 25% of what I charge, which is fairly reasonable considering I don’t have to be a credit card merchant or anything like that. They also provide “pay per click” ads in case I don’t have any advertisers (like now ;). Hopefully it will bring in a little extra.

I also did some various cleanups related to the FireWall-1 Gurus Mailing List web pages, which included adding the new banner advertising code from AdBrite and having the system auto-generate the archive index page. Quick and dirty shell scripts.

I can’t believe how many “quick and dirty” shell scripts keep the FireWall-1 Gurus Archive pages going. I forget what half of them do and I need to look at them very closely each time I have to modify something. Bad programming form, I know, but when you don’t want to put a lot of energy into something, quick and dirty shell scripts without documentation are what get written.