Merry Festivities and Fixes!

[AndyThomas]

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all when the time comes. It dawned on me a week or so ago that the site was looking quite broken, and whilst I'm not updating as such any more I did want to fix it. As it was apparent the issue was with the cascading style sheets, I thought perhaps I'd lost some backwards compatibility somewhere along the line. Turns out modern browsers really, really like https and so as I'd used absolute links to my style sheet that used http that link was falling over. Resulting in an unformatted site. Sigh. So I've just rather arduously applied a fix for both that and the pathway functionality, so things should now look more or less as they did. I'm sure many external links are broken and so on, but the core should be more navigable.

Do please try it out on your browser of choice and see if it remains broken - although the updates might take a while to filter through hopefully it will look more like its old self with a refresh. I laughed looking at the last update's time stamp - ten years ago. Almost to the day. Old habits, it seems, die hard...

[Crash]

Hi Andy!
Great to hear from you,
Merry, wonderful and joyous Christmas to you and all fleeters and everyone, I hope 2024 is good for everyone.

I thought that something had been changed on SFXB (I think I might have tried it yesterday).
I wondered whether to email you to tell you that the problem seemed to be fixed, but I didn't know whether it had been a browser problem that caused me that issue before.
I end up using different browsers quite a bit but never seem to find one that seems just right.

I can't find any problems with navigating the site. Everything works exactly as it should as far as I can see.


It amuses me a little that browsers are modern OSes are so focussed on security when it comes to websites and apps and yet the same devices harvest enormous amounts of personal data and upload just about everything you can think of for supposed diagnostic use.
The lines of communication between big tech and govt are so short as to be non-existent.

It's important to have website communication encrypted in general, since most sites tend to be interactive and many within that are desperate to sell you something and are handling monetary transactions, but it seems disingenuous for software products to be obsessive about security in that area while the vendors have enormous backdoors into their products and are barely more trustworthy in my estimation than the scammers that they purport to protect us from.

In the end, sites like ours that take an attitude of "just provide the requested subject matter info and don't require any user data in return" are on the way out because most sites are run by big businesses and customer/user data collection is big money for them.
This is why every shop chain and every toy and every gadget is desperate to have you download an app so that they can reel in what information they can about you.
Ultimately, theirs is an anti-Christian approach because the more unneeded data you have about someone, the more likely you are for someone to abuse it.


I did wonder how well you were getting on with your webhosts at present...
I get the feeling that our hosts are trying to bilk us due to the footprint of xbomber.co.uk, which is ~30GB and which I might like to increase for all sorts of reasons.
What they want us to do is to migrate across to a new, doubly-expensive emerald account, which is a new 'replacement' for ruby, which was the previous top consumer account, due to our space usage.
My attitude is that if my phone has a maximum storage of 1TB, then a webserver account shouldn't be suddenly having trouble storing 25GB and more.