This Old Page

I have an old web page here on my personal web site.

I write specifically about my scripting FTP file transfers web page. Go take a look, then come back for some navel gazing about it!

The content itself has been popular over the years. For a long time, it was the first result in any Google search for “ftp shell script” and similar keywords. It’s number 3 in DuckDuckGo right now for the same keywords. I’m surprised anyone still uses FTP in 2025. I was involved in a machine getting owned around 2002, and I’ve not willingly used FTP since. It’s all clear text.

Textually, the web page has evidence of age. The host name in the example code was a Sun Solaris server from a job I had November 2000 to January 2003.

The text references a “home page”, which was originally a directory full of HTML files in my $HOME directory at the long-lost Colorado SuperNet (R.I.P. 1997). I did host it out of my basement for years and years, during a period when my ISP, Qwest (now CenturyLink), had the technical ability to provide static IP addresses. Now that I think about it, the phrase “home page” is a precursor to the weak and sloppy language we use in 2025 to describe use of smartphones and point-n-click interfaces.

The content is older than 2001. I think I posted the example script to some “sources” Usenet group, before the Heat Death of Usenet, some time in the late 1990s. I discovered the shell scripting technique at a company I resigned from in 1992, and then didn’t need again until about 2001 or 2002, when I worked as the Solaris admin at a nearly 100% Windows shop.

The format of the web page hearkens to an earlier day as well. It’s in XHTML, the XML version of HTML. Back in the early 2000s, I did my entire personal web site in XHTML. I apparently used htmltidy to generate XHTML from some long lost, sloppy HTML. I will never understand why XHTML didn’t succeed. The XML people going with “schemas” rather than stricter, validatable DTDs constitutes a similar mystery. I guess people just like sloppy formats.

There’s evidence of versioning in a CVS archive. The string $ID$ appeared in the file until recently. But the token wasn’t expanded, unlike the CVS ID in my Unix computer virus references page. That web page has a 2000/05/13 date in it, and is also in XHTML format. I probably turned this page into XHTML around that same time.

The page had some JavaScript from the February 11, 2014 protest against 5 Eyes surveillance. I don’t even remember putting that JavaScript in place. I just removed it.

The lesson of this old web page is that entropy requires no maintenance.