Celestia Forums

<last edited 9jun03>


Ive taken the initiative to create a Celestia webring.
It is now completely ad free and powered by opensource software.

Here is the list of sites that are part of the ring.
http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/c ... lyharmless

The aim of this is to link together all the excellent Celestia related homepages that are out there and make it easy for everyone to find them.

Astroboy, Darkmiss, Don, Fridger, John, Jack, Pascal, Praesepe, Puduku, Rassilon and Selden I am inviting you all to join the webring.
Apologies to anyone I have missed.

I've put in a bit of effort to make the joining process as easy as possible.

Here is a link with the instructions on how to join,
http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/webring/index.htm

Also, thanks to Selden for the initial idea.

Marc.

later: Here is my list of add-on pages.
http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/m ... ?p=111#111

Have a nice day...

Bye Fridger

Have a nice day...

Bye Fridger

Marc,

There are quite a few free Webring hosting systems which do not include any advertisements at all. I suggest deleting the ring on webring.com and using one of the others.

A list of free advertising-free webring host sites is at
http://www.ringlink.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Web_Links&file=index&req=viewlink&cid=6

Some are open (anyone can create a ring on those servers), some require you to ask if they'll host the webring, and some are closed: at their limit of hosting webrings.

I'd suggest looking through them and finding a webring host that looks compatible and seems likely to be around for a while. My guess is that one of the "ask" sites would be a better choice -- just to minimize the possibility of winding up sharing a host with a controversial ring. There are 27 of the "ask first" servers, so there seems to be plenty of choices.

A rather good idea but you should work on those adds.

there was some stuff here about the first webring host that i tried. is now irrelevant

Excelent idea marc! Now Celestia users may find related pages with ease

I've just joined the ring, now, pending from approval

marc,
You are more then welcome to use that image. I am happy someone found antoher use for it. I myself may join the webring but not until I have my hub page ready and I learn a little more about html. As far as Fridger's comments, just ignore him. Let him do and go his own way.

Don.

Fridger,
I didnt realise that the webring hub has popups (my default browser phoenix supresses them) I dont blame you for getting annoyed as they piss me off too. Once its set up we shouldn't have any adds when traversing the ring.
Selden has pointed out an opensource alternative that I may be able to host on sourceforge, but i dont know how long that would take to set up or if i would even be able to get it to work. For now I'd rather spend my time on my own celestia addons. Also webring.com has been around for a while and is likely to stay around.

later...
all done is now completely add free.

Hi Marc,

after initiating this whole debate by

"stepping on Darkmiss' feet" (sorry for that!)
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2442&start=0,

I really appreciate your efforts for 'unification' of this venture, as well
as your initiative of creating a WEBring.

But after quite a bit of thinking about the internal /conception/ of
'webring.com', I guess it is better if you follow Don's friendly recommendation,

Don. Edwards wrote:As far as Fridger's comments, just ignore him. Let him do and go his
own way.

although he probably meant it in a slightly different sense;-).

Let me try to give you at least a flavor of what concerned me:

We are about to commit quite a bit of the marvelously uncommercial
spirit of Celestia and its friends into the hands of this thoroughly
commercial site. I think there is a basic mismatch of 'philosophy'.

...even if we play 'tricks', like you suggested, by

-- entering incorrect birthdays and email addresses,
-- switching on our 'commercial popup suppressors' (which I do not
have in Linux;-))
-- reducing their 'navigation' bar to a minimum
-- etc

As usual, most Americans will find my feelings exaggerated in this
respect...

Next, some of you might even remember that my 'Celestia Texture Foundry'
was the first dedicated Celestia texture site of its kind. Now there
are almost as many as there are different textures;-). I am very happy with
this trend. Probably, my site is simply coming a little to age and
needs some new input and fresh thoughts. Of course, it would most of
all need a little more spare time as concerns myself.

Hence, indeed

Don. Edwards wrote:As far as Fridger's comments, just ignore him. Let him do and go his
own way.

Unless there is a truly uncommercial WEBring
somewhere, let me at least mention that my personal preferences would go
much more into the directions Christophe proposed and Chris picked up
enthusiastically,

chris wrote:

Christophe wrote:
...Something like KDE look for
example.

Then the next step would be to build an interface to that repository
inside Celestia to automate the download and installation of add-ons,
a Windows Update for Celestia if you will.

This would be brilliant . . . I'd offer shatters.net, but I don't
have the bandwidth. Last week, over 30GB of traffic (almost entirely
Celestia-related) went over my DSL line. If my line was saturated
every second for a week, I could handle about 36GB, i.e. I'm scarily
close to maxing out my connection.

Christophe, do you know anyplace that would host an official add-on repository?

--Chris

Christophe wrote:I see two possible solutions:

I can try and get free hosting from the company I work for, that would
be shared hosting probably with limited storage but a very big
pipe. I'll keep you posted on this.

Or, I've been thinking of getting my own dedicated server from
Lost Oasis (warning, French
ahead). That would give me a lot of space but limited bandwidth
especially with international traffic. Anybody who's experimented with
an Open Brick is welcome to
comment on it.

During our extensive collaboration on Celestia's code, I was happy to
discover that apart from our mother tongues Christophe an I tend to speak
much of the 'same language' in various other respects...;-)

Bye Fridger

Well as Fridger pointed out if the web ring site is heavily commercial then maybe we should find an alternative. I can see eye to eye with him on this.
I also like to stay away from as much commercialism as possible. Hence I use a front end for IE that has a pop-up blocker built in. I myself may be having to consider moving my textures from the shatters.net server if Chris is getting close to his saturation point. All I know is we can't afford to let shatters.net get shutdown even temporarily because of bandwidth issues. I have seen many other sites go through growing pains like this and they never recover or they simply have to cut everything way back. That would be a shame. So lets everyone keep our eyes out for alternatives.

Don.

Don. Edwards wrote:Well as Fridger pointed out if the web ring site is heavily commercial then maybe we should find an alternative. I can see eye to eye with him on this.
I also like to stay away from as much commercialism as possible. Hence I use a front end for IE that has a pop-up blocker built in. I myself may be having to consider moving my textures from the shatters.net server if Chris is getting close to his saturation point. All I know is we can't afford to let shatters.net get shutdown even temporarily because of bandwidth issues. I have seen many other sites go through growing pains like this and they never recover or they simply have to cut everything way back. That would be a shame. So lets everyone keep our eyes out for alternatives.

Don.

For my part, I'm going to look seriously into upgrading the bandwidth for shatters.net. It currently costs me $120/month to keep it running--that's a lot, but then again I am using over 100GB of bandwidth a month. I'm less concerned about increased cost than the possibility that my line won't support much more than the 512kbps than I have now. Offsite hosting is an option, though I really like having the flexibility to install whatever PHP toys I like--not sure if anyone offers that.

One thing that I do know is that the main Celestia site will never have ads. I don't have a problem with people creating their own ad-supported Celestia sites--bandwidth does cost money after all--but it's not a compromise I'm willing to make for 'Celestia central'.

--Chris

chris wrote:
One thing that I do know is that the main Celestia site will never have ads. I don't have a problem with people creating their own ad-supported Celestia sites--bandwidth does cost money after all--but it's not a compromise I'm willing to make for 'Celestia central'.

--Chris

right so...

Bye Fridger

Going back to the web ring, I did as the instructions said to 2 days ago, and I have yet to see any change.

Ok, ive been convinced. I think it is pretty important to get everyone onto a webring.
It looks like sourceforge allows server side perl scripting which means that I should be able to get the ringlink ring management software running in my sourceforge webspace.
Im pretty busy the next few days so give it a week.

Once I get it going I will delete the webring.comring.

I might not get home this weekend to modify the joining instructions so don't join the current ring just yet

Sorry praesepe, billybob, you will have to update your webpages again.

<added later>
All finished, the celestia webring is now completely free and based on opensource software.

Join here: http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/webring/index.htm

chris wrote:For my part, I'm going to look seriously into upgrading the bandwidth for shatters.net. It currently costs me $120/month to keep it running--that's a lot, but then again I am using over 100GB of bandwidth a month. I'm less concerned about increased cost than the possibility that my line won't support much more than the 512kbps than I have now. Offsite hosting is an option, though I really like having the flexibility to install whatever PHP toys I like--not sure if anyone offers that.

I'm pretty sure you can get better hosting deals in the US than in France, and over here for that kind of money you can find some very good dedicated hosting solutions. Here for example you get 1 Mbps on a provided dedicated server for 150EUR/month. So looking for offsite hosting is certainly worthwhile.

Also, creating a not for profit association to collect donations (some people have asked how to do that in the past) and pay for the hosting exepenses might be a good idea, that may be beneficial tax-wise too (?)

v2.0

The Celestia web ring is now completely ad free and powered by opensource software. (ringlink)

The joining process is even easier as well.

Here is a link with the instructions on how to join,
http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/webring/index.htm

The webring.com ring has been deleted.
Praesepe, Billybob can you please delete the old webring code and join the new one.
Sorry about the false start everyone.

Brilliant!

I've just signed up for it!

my page is http://www.losoffspring.com.ar
i have only one add-on yet. i will try to put more things in my page.

can i also enter the web ring???

I've rejoined too and changed the html code