Bit Rot
By all rights, this blog should be dead.
Frankly, the entire website is so old and out of date and willfully not maintained that I’m surprised there’s any traffic to it. But, there is. And with any large volume of people, there are always those who take advantage and push free resources beyond their intended use. Well, that’s just what happened here.
One of the many things I originally did with this site was dabble in conlangs, or CONstructed LANGuages. Toward that end, I created or modified several Perl scripts to help me generate words that sounded authentic and consistent according to some linguistic rules. When I was doing this, very few people were yet. Now, there are many, many more people who offer language generation programs and scripts, but I think I was one of the first people to have free, interactive web pages that would let the neophyte conlanger generate or manipulate their language. In fact, I’m not sure how many there are even today. Hopefully, there are a lot more who can take the burden of people ramming quite literally gigabytes worth of data through their free resource. I hope they have their own server, though, since when people did that here, it crashed the server I was on. Yeah, that’s right, people ran so much data through my little programs that it crashed the server. In spite of me asking them not to do it, then building in some fairly significant limitations on how much data could be sent to the script at once, a small percentage of the users, who I have come to think of as abusers, still managed to crash my webhost’s server.
So, sadly, my conlang scripts are starting to go off-line. One bye one, like fading stars, they’re being pummeled off the internet by people who never appreciated them, apparently.
But, what really makes me sad is that so many people who did NOT abuse them, but used my little scripts to enhance and improve their writing or leasure time won’t be able to use them all any more. Those innocent bystanders will simply have to do without because of the greed of a few pushy, obnoxious people who had to test the limits of the system.
So, to those of you who played nice and were friendly and enjoyed my little conlang scripts, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but now when they start to cause problems for my provider, I’ll have to take them off-line, one by one.
I hope you enjoyed them half as much as I did while they were here.
