DEC Emulation Website

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 07:39:01PM -0700, Zane Healy wrote:
[...]
> My chief complaint is that it suffers from a readability problem.
> Part of that is for the “updates” sections at the start of each
> page.  Let’s be serious, the pages haven’t been actively updated for
> years, so that’s no longer really valid.  There is new info out
> there, and a lot of links I’m sure are dead.

It seems that your site could get some updating, indeed. Some links
are dead and some point to your old website, or something. And I think
it could be better to have one central "what's new" section.

Other than this, I can use it very comfortably in elinks - including
left and right clicking the links.

> Though what’s really changed is my attitude towards emulation.  This
> might sound odd, but when I wrote the pages, I wasn’t that much in
> favor of emulation, and was more inclined to run on the real
> hardware.

In other words, you would like to put some more stuff to your website.

I have had a look, and I think that perhaps you should try to select
some more recent tool, or tools to do this new job. Unless you would
like to keep using the previous tool, but wikipedia says it is
discontinued. Once you have a tool, the rest is just some time and
maybe perseverance. Out of the top of my head, before I drop:

 - Emacs + org-mode - myself, I would have looked at that first,
   mostly because I have already invested some time into learning
   Elisp, Emacs, and am able to use org in some basic way, so it could
   be perhaps just learning a bit on top of it - but if you do not
   know Emacs, this would be a very uphill project. It might require
   writing a snippet of Elisp or two.

   Some people have created nice pages with org-mode:
   http://orgmode.org/worg/org-web.html

   like this:
   http://srandby.org/

 - variation of above - more code snippets to help yourself, in some
   yet another language

I have never made a website in this way, so I have zero practical
knowledge about process. I suspect it is very easy as long as one
follows some path described in manual, and then gradually harder when
it comes to bending org-mode to one's specific wishes.

 - adopt some wiki and remake your new site in its image - I am sure
   there must be something not so complicated, not depending on stuff
   I myself consider untrusty (like PHP, which many people use
   happily, but I would rather not). Advantage: you could probably get
   going in a day or two, site should look ok in many different
   browsers and you do not have to start from designing website
   structure, just start putting content into pages and tag it.

Anyway, I would stay away from more complicated solutions, whatever
they are written in, unless I was ready to read the source code on as
needed basis (I am ready with Elisp/Emacs, so this would I choose, or
at least considered - I am not ready to learn PHP and keep it ready to
use, so I do not choose Wordpress, even if it can be used by people
with almost no tech knowledge, from what I have seen - and besides WP
has a baggage of its own security problems, so using it seems to me
a bit like plowing a minefield).

> It’s a heck of a lot more practical to leave SIMH running
> on a VM, than it is to have a real VAX or PDP-11 running 24x7.
[...]
> Mind you, while I have a couple emulated VAXen running, I also have
> a real VAX, and a rather nice Alpha running 24x7.

Yeah, emulation is even more practical for those of us, who have no
place for too many things, not even smaller VAX :-).

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **