WebSiteRobot V. 1.2.3
01  WebSiteRobot V. 1.2.3

By: Poly
This is WebSiteRobot Version 1.2.3. It creates and hosts web sites on any computer connected to the Internet. Instead of wasting time with HTML, FTP, Web hosting companies that would rent you a tiny space, you can use your own computer to host multimedia. If you stop and think a little, you would realize that this technology is overdue, yet we are still trying to do things the old way, missing out truly great possibilities. You may contact me with your street address ad I will gladly send you a CD, or you can downloadt it from download.com
September 10, 2003
 
Ever since I ran into fractal, I have become very fascinated with them. They are indeed beautiful. There is more. Something like a mysterious element in that their governing equations is deceptively simple, yet they lead to some naturally magical patterns. If fractals are so close to natural forms and we have not yet found a way to use them for say file compression, it means we know really so little about our own world. In fact, think of it this way: you can use short wave radio to broadcast analog voice to an audience thousands of miles away. Try to push the same voice message in the same medium after digitizing it: the shear volume of data will just chok it. wsr blog This is WebSiteRobot Version 1.2.3. It creates and hosts web sites on any computer connected to the Internet. Instead of wasting time with HTML, FTP, Web hosting companies that would rent you a tiny space, you can use your own computer to host multimedia. If you stop and think a little, you would realize that this technology is overdue, yet we are still trying to do things the old way, missing out truly great possibilities. You may contact me with your street address ad I will gladly send you a CD, or you can downloadt it from download.com This screen shows the Control Center of WebSIteRobot. As you can see, it is a simple no non-sense GUI. On the left is the Synchronizer that checks the files in your MyWebSite folder and updates you web site on the Internet. The text area gives an inventory of the files found and the below it is a progress bar. On the right is the Web Server with a start and stop button. The text area displays the activities of visitors in your web site in real time. One important design concept on this interface is to give you control of the Robot, but only in a meaningful way. That is, if the Server is on, you can only stop it. If you tell the Robot to Start the web server while it is already running, it might think you are crazy or you are not paying attention. Most interfaces just give you options and options that you click and go like, oh what was that. For example, most word processords would gladly let you print an empty document! If you ask the Robot to verify your web site while it is in the process of synchronizing, it will not hang like you know whose interfaces, it will nicely tell you what its busy doing at this time, and hope that you come back later! It is so natural, it's almost boring. You start this guy expecting to go trough hell to build a web site, but then oops, it does it all for you, thumbnails, music samples, links, IP tracking, you name it, no question asked. This is basically the screen that I am using to type these notes. Once again it is a very clean and simpe, interface. THat apparent simplicity hides a host of cool features. On the left is the directory tree of the MyWebSite folder. The multimedia file selected on the left brings up the notes for that item on the right, ready for edition. The nice thing about this whole interface is that you cannot make a mistake unless of course you really want to. For example, before you go to the next item, you have to either save the current changes you made to the notes, or discard the changes and revert to the previous selection. This is the server that hosts this page. It has a 1.7MHz AMD CPU with 512MB RAM. The OS is indeed Linux, Red Hat 9 (the last Red Hat Linux, as they will now offer only the Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the Fedora Project). It is on battery backup and I have only stopped it once in about 6 months of operation.
This is the DSL Modem that connects this page to the Internet. While I was researching the WebSiteRobot concept, the web was full of rumors about what would work or not work. The fact is, manufacturers cannot imagine all the use cases. Why would anyone want to run a web server at home? It's too compliated, the average user will not have the skills to do it riht, better yet, let's just make it unlawful and enforce a user agreement saying that they cannot do this or that. Come on, why not? To an extend, freedom is meaningless unless you know all the possibilities. If you don't have your car keys, you are actually not free to drive it. Likewise, if you cannot configure your DSL correctly, you are limited to browse the web meanwhile you could be publishing on it too.
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