I nearly published it Today anyhow, but I feel that it's not quite ready yet. I've got the first third of the book close, it's probably on it's third draft by now, but I don't think it's quite ready, so I'm going to hold off. It still needs a new set of eyes to proof-read it, and I've decided I want to do a full, straight read-through before I call it done as well, so we're looking at a bit longer before it's ready.

I've recently discovered OSRIC (a AD&D retro-clone), and I've started writing up my own setting, so I'll probably post a few bits and pieces about that at least. (Though I expect I'll probably drop back into Politics, Religion, and Technology on occasion as well)

As part of this restarting process of converted my blog from BashBlogger over to Kukkaisvoima, and set up rewrites from my more popular pages to their new URLs. Kukkaisvoima is a pretty simple lightweight dynamic blog engine, unfortunately it is missing a couple of features I'd like (seriously, it hasn't got a blogroll), but the whole engine is a 1400 line Python script, so I think I should be able to patch it fairly easily.

Features

The feature list isn't anything special; their service is more designed for people who have a more detailed idea of what they are doing. The don't have anything fancy like cpanel, though they do have a nice easy to configure AWStats set up already, which is certainly nice. As a consequence to use their service you need to have a passing familiarity with the Unix command line; they use FreeBSD, but my knowledge of Linux has been more than sufficient. This requirement for command-line knowledge might be off-putting for some, but I'm one of those people who prefer the command line for most tasks. Otherwise it's just your typical Unix shared web host, with PHP, CGI, etc.

Performance

While I haven't done anything like rigorous performance testing, the performance seems acceptable for a light-weight, text-centric site like mine. If you where using a site with heavy multimedia though, you may encounter some problems.

Price

The price is exceptional. It's so far cost me five cents to host my site for the last five months. Their pricing scheme is complex, but basically you just pay based on the amount of data you have on their servers and the amount of data you transfer, so if your site is very big, in disk usage, or has very high traffic, it will start to cost more. My blog is a small, unfortunately not super popular, primarily text site, so it's very cheap for me.

Support

Support is fairly responsive; I've had to contact them twice so far with simple configuration requests, both of which they have replied to and resolved within six hours. I work for a SaaS company in customer support and I'm jealous of their support times.

Conclusions

Overall, I think NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is an excellent host, at an excellent price. Though perhaps not suited for some people who aren't as technically minded. The only problem I've encountered so far was my own fault, basically I migrated my comments script to the new host, running an entirely different OS, without first checking that it would work, so it was down for a while, before I got it fixed.

It sounds like the Labour Government's "Clean Feed" policy is probably not going to happen. So, it looks like it's time to add Nick Xenophon to my list of "Politicians less bad than Labour". He still doesn't get beyond being one of the lesser of a whole multitude of evils though; he did vote for the "stimulus" package after all.

I find the second last sentence on the first page worrying though: "And last month, ACMA added an anti-abortion website to its blacklist because it showed photographs of what appears to be aborted foetuses." So basically the Government thinks it should be able to censor either minority political views and/or images of the result of "legal medical procedures". I certainly hope I'm not the only one that finds either of these possibilities very, very disturbing.

1. I missed a post last week, I'll try and get an extra post up on Sunday or Monday to make up for it.
2. I had one of my pictures posted on InsectPOD
3. Slackware 12.2 was released a couple of days ago.
4. Today's Word of the Day is pollard, cool. :-)