Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2018-07)

Updated 2022-10-23 13:40 GMT.
By Damon Hart-Davis.
Tech updates: warming up to HTTP/2 and Brotli and HTTPS, and the rest.
tools
This month's excitements: clocking up 25,000 edits in the site's repo, and preparing for an upgrade to a faster RPi3 with more storage.

2018-07-29: 25,000 Edits!

I just made check-in #25000 in the SVN repository underlying EOU, which will account for the vast majority of those edits!

2021-08-12: message from the future — now at revision 41029! Also, Brotli and HTTP/2 almost make up for the overheads of HTTPS...

2018-07-15: Raspberry Pi 3 and a new Raspbian

On Friday night it seemed that my Internet router had died completely (no lights on, no signs of life).

So I finally ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and started the process of setting it up as server and WiFi access point. That should save me some power and shelf-space and some heat on that shelf too!

It would also likely improve the reliability of this site since the router went down very roughly once per month, whereas the Pi (2) has been more robust.

But the other important feature of starting again from scratch with a new OS version is that I move from one based on Debian GNU/Linux 7.11 (wheezy) up two versions to "Stretch".

Amongst other things that gets me a new Apache with the 'event' model, and the ability to properly run a new TLS, and therefore HTTP/2 and Brotli and Service Workers. At least on those properties that I make available over HTTPS.

(Interesting from @ericlaw: Firefox HTTP/1.x observations: 53% of requests sent immediately, 25% blocked over 100ms, 5% >1300ms. HTTP/2, 95% requests sent immediately.)

The RPi3 should also be a little faster, though EOU is already in the top percentile or so of sites by speed, at least by some metrics.

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