Keith Graham

I have added a windows task that updates my statistics program at midnight every day so at least I am keeping a good record of what is happening. The stats show a few hundred hits per day on CTHREEPO.com and JT30.com. This is far less than my good old days where I would get 20,000 hits per day. I am not sure what has happened. (I think that I know. Facebook has pretty much replaced web browsing and people rely on Facebook as an aggregator of information.)
Erica’s iPhone is acting strange and is mostly useless. I am backing it up now and I will be doing a hard reset. This appears to be the last resort. Actually, second to last resort. I have a spare iPhone that I using to clone Erica’s phone. 1) I want to see if the problem is repeatable across phones. 2) If the spare works well, it will be Erica’s main phone.
I wrote a science fiction short story. It is the first SF story that I’ve written in over two years. I did write a short Mystery story and sold it last year, but this is the real deal. I am letting it ferment and I will go over it again looking for problems and ways to improve it. I wrote 3,000 words in one day. That’s a whole bunch of mistakes that I must have made. The problem is, that it is hard to see the mistakes I make, since I made them and my mind ignores them. I will reformat the story in a few days and go over it line by line. I expect it to go out to the big pro markets starting next week. I always start with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction because that is the place where I’d really like to make a sale.

I’ve started working on a version of “Astounding Spam” and “Stop Spammers” plugins that does not require WordPress. I have researched how to load a PHP program before anything else loads. This will allow any website that can run PHP to stop spam from loading up on form submits.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever finish it, but at least I have the idea and have even written part of it.
This year I harvested about 40 pounds of honey from my hives and I’ll be getting some more, perhaps, next week. The first batch is almost gone.
I installed Awstats on my home server and I am trying to get it to work right so I can see what kind of traffic I get. I am getting very few hits on my websites. Google doesn’t seem to find my sites anymore. Installing Awstats is the first step in doing the necessary SEO optimization of my sites. The problem that I am having is updating the Awstats library every day. I’ll be checking in a few minutes to see if my “task manager” solution has worked.
I have been downloading Jason Ricci’s Harmonica instruction videos as audio only and putting them on an iPod. I like my old iPods. They have many hours of battery life and I can listen while I walk without the complications of using my phone. I am going to create a “mix tape” of the things that I need to practice.
Erica and I are running out of British crime dramas. I may have to actually pay for Acorn TV. There is absolutely nothing on network TV to watch right now.

I wanted to produce a guide to creating a home server, but it could fill a book and probably would be obsolete within a month of me writing it. I decided to just list the steps and anyone interested in this could google for the details.

If you have a website already, like I did, these are the steps that I took to get it on my home server.

1) Get a CloudFlare account and set your DNS to point to the CloudFlare DNS. CloudFlare has lots of information on how to do this. CloudFlare helps you set up SSL which is “Secure Socket Layer”. SSL is an absolute requirement for a website. CloudFlare does all the work for you once you use their DNS.
2) Transfer your Domain registration to CloudFlare. You should do this immediately. CloudFlare is far cheaper that most other registrars. I saved $4 a year on a dozen domains. I save about $36 a year by using CloudFlare as a registrar. Since I am retired, I like saving cash.
3) Get yourself a cheap desktop computer running Windows. You need this to stay up all the time. My computer is 12 years old. I put an SSD drive in it and changed the power supply. It runs cool and quiet. I expect it to last another 10 years. I’ll have to vacuum it out every year because the fans build up cat hair.
4) Install WAMP on your server and set it so it starts up automatically whenever the server starts up.
5) Set your Server to use a static IP address. This means it will always use the same ip number whenever it starts up so that the router doesn’t give a new address every time you reboot.
6) Configure your router to let web ports 80 and 443 through your the router directly to your server’s IP address. This step is a little obscure when you google it and is different for every router. You may have to call your router company’s help line to get a clue how to do this.
7) Open the Window’s firewall on your server to let 80 and 443 into your server so that WAMP can see it. This is a little complicated and different for every version of Windows and your anti-virus software may have to be configured, too.
8) Go to your Internet company (the one you pay the bill to every month. Around here it is Optimum or AT&T). You have to get the internet company to let ports 80 and 443 into your machine. Some companies block this to keep out pirates. They may want to charge you for this, but for me it was as simple as checking a box on my account setup page.
9) Get a free account at NOIP.COM. This is a service that will keep track of your server’s external IP address, the one that world uses to find you. You will wind up with a NOIP subdomain like myserver,dnsns.net. If you go to a browser and type this in you should be able to see your Wamp welcome screen. I am not sure about this, you may have to add the NOIP subdomain to WAMP in order to see it.
10) Download and install the NOIP automatic update software so that it will check you every 5 minutes in case your internet company randomly changes it.
11) Configure your Windows Hosts file to see your NOIP subdmain.
12) Add your NOIP subdomain to WAMP and restart WAMP.
13) Check with a browser that you your NOIP subdomain will show your server welcome page. If you don’t, start googling to see what you did wrong.
14) Copy your domain files into a sub-directory on your server. Make sure you get all of it. Test it under WAMP. You may need to add a dummy name to the Hosts file and add a new url to your WAMP configuration.
15) Now it’s time flip your domain to your home server. Go to CloudFlare and delete all of the dns records. There is no going back, now. Add the two CNAME records. One pointing to your NOIP subdomain for your main domain and another for the WWW subdomain. NOIP has lots of information how to do this with CloudFlare.
16) Update your WAMP VHOSTS file so that it shows your domain and restart WAMP. There is lots of information on Google on how to do this.
Bob’s your Uncle.
I am an experienced computer guy. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for 50 years. It took me two weeks to get all this working. I made lots of mistakes. IF YOU CAN READ THIS, then it works. This is running on my home computer.

I used to use my JT30.com and kpgraham.com domains for some email addresses. I reasoned at the time that I needed to protect my gmail address to avoid spam. Those days are gone and thank goodness that gmail does a good job filtering spam.
I still have these odd email addresses that I use for account logins and for some newsletters. When I moved most of my domains to my home web server I lost these. The email was offered as a service by my hosting company, but now my hosting company is me.
I needed a way to service these domain email accounts. My first idea was to run an email server on my home computer. I decided this was overkill for three or four email addresses. I knew that CloudFlare DNS let me add MX records. The MX record in your DNS controls how other email servers discover your server in order to send you email. I had no idea how to configure MX records.
After some Googling, I discovered that there are free services that will “forward” email from one domain to another and all you have to do is set up the MX record.
I signed up with improvMX.com and set all email going to JT30, CTHREEPO, and KPGraham to go to my Gmail address. The site gave clear instructions for setting up my MX records plus a TXT record. Now, if you sent an email to [email protected] it will wind up in my gmail account.
ImprovMX has been steady and working well for about a week now. I know nothing about the company, but it ranks high in Google, which is usually a good sign that it is popular. It ranks high on a some internet surveys. I have already received a few emails that I would have missed without knowing it. Since these emails aren’t mission critical I don’t need to be worry. If ImproMX dies, there are many alternatives.