Well, I originally set up my home-site on shlomif.il.eu.org, which is a free DNS service, but it had a lot of DNS problems. Thus, I set up https://www.shlomifish.org/. I didn’t take shlomifish.org.il because .il domains used to cost a lot of money, and also required co-ordination by a fax message (how low-tech) upon every change. I also didn’t want a .com domain because I feel I’m a private individual rather than a company.

http://shlomifish.org/ used to be a parked hostname of my DNS registrar, but now redirects to www.shlomifish.org. This is also the case for shlomifish.com, which I bought later.

You can call it “Shlomi Fish’s Homepage”, “Shlomi Fish’s Homesite”, “Shlomi Fish’s personal web site”, or “shlomifish.org”. Some wrong ways to refer to it are:

1. “Your blog” - it is not a blog and I have more than one blog and site.

2. “shlomifish” or “ShlomiFish” - Shlomi Fish (with capital letters and a space) happens to be my name as written in Latin letters, and I’m a flesh-and-blood individual and more than just this site. It just happens that I picked the appropriate domain for that.

For several reasons:

1. There are many more English speakers (either as their mother tongue or as a secondary language) than Hebrew speakers. So I’m reaching a bigger target audience by writing in English.
2. Most native Hebrew speakers (i.e: Israelis) can read English well enough to understand my English writing. So most of the target audience for writing stuff in Hebrew will benefit from it very little.
3. I find it more comfortable and faster to type in English and express myself in writing using English for most types of writing (some stories I’m writing being an exception).
4. I often use a lot of tech jargon or slang, which is more difficult to translate to Hebrew.

That put aside, if you wish to translate a piece I wrote to any other language (including Hebrew), feel free to do so. I contributed some Hebrew translations to some English articles that other people originated, and also translated some things I wrote in Hebrew to English.

Note that I’m using Commonwealth English on this site. Partly because I think that’s what Israelis are supposed to use, partly because I have been somewhat British-oriented, and partly because it feels nicer to use an uncommon spelling. I am still using US English spelling for source code and for technical documents, though.

My thoughts are that both the British spelling and the American spelling (and their common subset), are inconsistent and confusing, but I have to make a choice of some sort.

A lot. I spent several hundreds of hours on the site, possibly several thousands. While the pages of this site were originally just a collection of hand-maintained HTML pages, they were then converted to use Website Meta Language, and converted to have a common look and feel, a style that’s hopefully semantic, converted to use valid XHTML markup (XHTML 1.1 for the while); some navigation aids were added, etc.

All of the source code for the site is available online in various places. I’ve prepared a top-to-bottom document on how to compile the site from scratch). Some of the hand-crafted code was released as the Latemp Content Management System or various assisting CPAN modules under an open-source license.

I am still working on the site, both by adding new content and attractions, by revising or correcting existing ones, by making it more usable, or by trying to publicise new attractions in various online resources.

Recently (November 2019) I converted the main pages of the site from wml to Template Toolkit, which is faster and less quirky, and also implemented better caching for the talks' slides.

Well, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step and continues with many subsequent small steps.

My homesite started from a small number of static HTML pages kept on the server of my workplace back then (Smart Link - smlink.com). It had the address http://www.smlink.com/~shlomif/, now inactive, where shlomif was my username on ibm.net back then (which ended up becoming my general unofficial ID). We hosted the server behind our Point-to-Point connection (not such a smart idea retrospectively) and we had to create the alias in IIS specifically for me to put stuff there.

I recall that I had the Aphorisms collection with a few jokes I originated, as well as the report about the algorithmic solution to the Toggle Squares puzzle I sent to its originator (with whom I was corresponding at the time). And it also had a rudimentary pageful of links, and a bio.

When I became a student in the Technion, I moved my site to its undergraduate server at the address http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ . There I added more and more resources to the site. Here is the site as of 1998. I had a limited quota there, and when I got an account on “vipe”, a server managed by the students, I hosted part of my home site there as well, as http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ . The two parts of the site had cross-links to one another.

Eventually, I was about to graduate and so moved the t2.technion.a.il part of my homesite, first to shlomif.il.eu.org (a free hostname, which ended up causing too many DNS problems), and then to www.shlomifish.org which is where it has been residing until now. In the process, I converted all of the main pages to use Website Meta Language and what would eventually become Latemp. This has enabled the site to have a common look and feel, a nice CSS stylesheet, a navigation menu and other navigation aids and other nice features.

Eventually I realised that the vipe server has too much down time (due to problems at the Technion’s network) and moved all of its content over to the www.shlomifish.org domain.

Throughout all this time, many resources were added to the homesite: software, essays, stories, artwork, presentations, puzzles, and more information about myself. I also now maintain a large number of blogs and sites for my projects, as well as sites I volunteered to maintain. I really like the way the web allows me to express myself, and to communicate using text, hypertext, and other types of media.

Even more recently, I've been writing more and more on social media outlets. There’s a list of my accounts for many social media and user-generated-content sites on every page of my home site.

In case you’re interested in setting up a personal web site of your own, I wrote an article about it, which you can read.

The short answer is that www.shlomifish.org is a good, old-fashioned, Web 1.0-style home site - not a weblog/blog/online journal. Despite all that, my web site is fairly modern in its client-side technology and its look-and-feel should be usable and attractive enough. I have several blogs and am not opposed to the concept, but a classic web site has many advantages. For more information, see:

• “Create a Great Personal Home Site”

• “Homepage vs. Blog”

Update: (November 2019) I am now serving mostly XHTML5 and also serving it as application/xml+xhtml.

I feel that validating against an XHTML schema makes my code cleaner and less buggy, because I need to have closing tags, as well as use a trailing “/” for standalone tags, etc. I also find the additional XHTML 1.1 restrictions to be a good idea.

Therefore I decided to make XHTML 1.1 the default doctype for the pages on my site. The reason I’m serving them as text/html is because Microsoft Internet Explorer does not handle application/xml+xhtml properly, and I’d rather not needlessly discriminate against people who still use it (possibly against their will).

I realise that it stands against the XHTML standard, but I’m not a standards purist, and want to be a bit pragmatic in still supporting Explorer. Note that some pages in the Math-Ventures section end with the .xhtml suffix and are served as XHTML because they contain MathML.

The answer is that not everything that I wrote, quoted and/or placed on my homepage and on other kinds of Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) mediums is still something I agree with (i.e: I changed my mind since then), or should be taken too seriously (i.e: may be amusing or thought provoking but isn’t really something I agree with), or that should be taken as an unbreakable rule (i.e: because such works are usually guidelines rather than something that should be taken as gospel). So please take them with a grain of salt, and apply your judgement.

Naturally, it does not help that I often omit the dates of creation and last update from a resource, and that I sometimes neglect to add a “Recent Update” note at the top of the page when it becomes irrelevant. If you have the necessary technical skills, you can peruse the pages’ history in the version control repository.

Please don't ask me that, and that's not because I can't tell you that - it's because I don't think it matters too much. This is the same kind of penis envy (= “my $THINGY is bigger than yours”) and false machoflops/etc. competitions) and I care little for stuff like that. I'm now trying to work on creating more and more good content, enhancing the site usability better, and working on better publicity - both using Internet-based media and using real-world networking - and don't have the energy to spend time on silly statistics.

Update: (November 2019) This site now uses HTTPS.

For several reasons:

1. The site does not require registration, and nothing here can be modified using a web interface. As a result, HTTPS is unnecessary.

2. HTTPS incurs some bandwidth and roundtrip overhead.

3. HTTPS prevents pages from being cached.

4. HTTPS requires a more capable hosting account than what I need or can afford to actively maintain.

5. Keep it simple.

6. You can mirror the site using wget --mirror if you care about "privacy".

The simple answer to that question is: no. I speak my mind and express myself using the words in the English language that I find appropriate and find that deliberately removing text and other content from web sites is the modern day equivalent to burning books, which as Heinrich Heine predicted eventually leads to burning people (which in modern times usually only amounts to blocking them from speaking on an Internet subforum). So I'm not going to do it unless absolutely necessary.

As noted elsewhere on this F.A.Q., I have a strong stance against political correctness fanaticism. Furthermore, as the old tale of “The miller, his son, and the donkey” demonstrates, trying to comply with everyone's whims regarding what they disapprove of in this site, is a slippery slope, that will lead to a lot of content removed.

For more information, see:

• “Encourage criticism and try to get offended”

Note that I’m open to adding visible notes at the tops of individual pages with updates, corrections, or saying that I no longer approve of their content. But this is assuming I agree with them.

Many people whom I gave links to the various resources on my site, accused me of linking to them in order to drive in traffic for my site. First of all, I should note that it sounds like what I call a “conspiracy theory” where one tries to formulate an ulterior motive explanation instead of assuming purity of intents.

That put aside - what will driving traffic to my site, buy me exactly? I don't get paid for each visitor or "unique hit" or whatever, and the Project Wonderful ads that used to be on my site were not pay-per-click, but rather pay-per-time (and now are no longer present after Project Wonderful announced that they will stop operating). While I admit I’d like my site to be as popular as possible, the real reason why I link to pages there is because they are relevant to the discussion at hand. If you’re too envious of me linking to my site, then please stop and get your own site which you can start populating with interesting content to your heart’s content.

Most of the site is comprised of static HTML web pages, which are uploaded to the web-site as they are, after being generated using templates, data, and programs. The site’s sources are public and kept in a public version control repository, which also contains some automated tests and makes use of a continuous integration service.

While I am not ashamed of the site’s sources, they have been through a long history and legacy, and while I remain a big fan of static site generation, there are probably some better approaches out there for that, and often it is simpler to just write something of your own using a good preprocessor or a template system, a good build system and some code glue. However, for me, converting to something else would be too time-consuming, and I've already found some faults in one existing popular static site generator that I tried.

See above - most of the site is generated using code and data and is served as static content on the server. There are about three CGI scripts written in Perl 5 using CGI-Minimal but they do not serve most of the content.

It is true that I make use of a lot of Perl code to generate the site's content, but the site's source code is not limited to Perl, and it does not run on the web server, nor is required to run most of it.

I guess I'd be interested to hear reports about them as long as one provides the text of the link and their URL. Note that it is the nature of the web that links get broken and it is part of what makes it work. Moreover, I've had this site for many years, and it is natural that some of the links have become stale. As a result, dealing with these reports have become quite frustrating due to their frequency

First of all note that I do not consider myself an expert on load time optimisations, and you may be able to find better advice elsewhere using a web search.

That put aside, here are some factors that may contribute to this:

1. Some of it has to do with my web hosting, currently HostGator. While not perfect, I am quite happy with them, and can recommend them for shared hosting.

2. It is possible the site does not receive a lot of traffic for a variety of reasons (not sure).

3. I enabled server-side gzip/deflate/etc. compression.

4. XHTML/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all minimised.

5. I use common external stylesheets, script files, and images instead of embedding them on every page.

6. The website is mostly static and served from the server's hard disk directly without potentially costly server-side scripting.

7. I avoid loading unnecessary JavaScript codes and other resources from other sites (with some possible exceptions.).

8. PNG images are compressed using OptiPNG ; SVG images are used as well.

   Moreover, I recently started to increasingly make use of WebP.

9. I sometimes remove various embellishments of the site, that while seemed a good idea or were one at a time, are no longer needed.

10. The navigation menu is partly populated after the page load by using an XMLHttpRequest (or so-called "AJAX") call to a static JSON file.

Some factors may play against the site's responsiveness (e.g: use of XHTML instead of HTML, or use of valid markup).

Also see:

1. Tweet about average web page size

2. Wired feature about the average web page size

Well, the site's old fashioned look may be part of its charm, and kinda lets it stands out from every Bootstrap Website ever. That put aside, feel free to submit pull-requests, patches, or CSS fragments if you think they will improve matters.