Chips 'n Dip is a Moving Target [First there's the web site] The web site was at http://divarin1.sdf.org Then it was (also) at https://sdf.org/~divarin1 Then I registered a domain name: chips-n-dip.com. I'm not thrilled about the dashes but it's what I could get. I redirected this to https://sdf.org/~divarin. Then, SDF kept having technical issues. I sympathize with the issues they are dealing with and I understand there's been some DDoSing going on. So I eventually moved the site over to divarin.net (a domain name and web host I've had for decades but haven't had much use for lately). Now I redirected chips-n-dip.com to divarin.net/chipsndip This also let me use PHP to make the site easier to maintain, less html files to update. Now, the host for divarin.net took a dump (which is not uncommon) and I know given a few hours they (the small computer store in my home town which hosts this) will wake up, unlock the store for the day, find their servers are down, get them going again. SDF does also support PHP but it must be an older version because it didn't support my code. I could refactor it to be compatible with SDF's version of PHP but I don't want to, plus SDF has downtime as well. [Then there's the stream] As I posted in a previous phlog there was a period of a few days where aNONradio was down and even though that is in the past aNONradio still has periods of instability. Yesterday it was rebuffering badly with < 20 listeners. In the last post (Divarin Radio) I mentioned setting up my own streaming server (well not self-hosted, not sure my upstream bandwidth is good enough for that) but buying bandwidth at internet-radio.com. Now there's a few different ways to stream to two icecast servers at once: Option 1) Send to aNONradio, have Divarin Radio pull from my aNONradio mountpoint (this is what I've done to this point) Option 2) Send to aNONradio, have Divarin Radio pull from the main aNONradio stream (if aNONradio is having issues, this won't help things) Option 3) Send to Divarin Radio and have aNONradio pull from there (I don't know if this is possible, I don't see a way to configure this) Option 4) Send to aNONradio and Divarin Radio at the same time (this is the cleanest solution but does require that I have two streams uploading at once but since it's only audio is probably not a problem, I will try this going forward) Changing options changes the URL to the Divarin Radio stream, going from Option 1 to Option 4 the URL to the stream will end in /stream instead of /anonradio. So if anyone bookmarked the old URL then they not be able to tune in with that old URL, actually I think they way it's set up they would but for them it would be using Option 1. [Then there's the archives] I was using aNONradio's archives recording for the links on the web site and the podcast feed. Only making my personal recordings available via Gopher or if I found the aNONradio recording to be glitchy. But after 4 weeks of consistently glitchy aNONradio recordings and tired of spending the extra time to listen to the program to see if I need to re-link to my own recording I decided I needed to just always link to my own recordings and not rely on the aNONradio archives at all. I can't upload them to divarin.net because that host doesn't provide enough storage space. I'd rather not self-host these as I don't want to deal with the upstream bandwidth cost of bots and leechers repeatedly pulling gigabytes of audio files. Coincidentally at around this time my wife is talking about wanting to get into selling t-shirts and framed posters which she will design and possibly even photograph (for the posters). I'm not sure yet if she's going to do that but I wanted to support her and thought it might motivate her if I created a web site for her. So I searched for some web hosting with enough storage for both her designs and my Chips 'n Dip recordings. This is now at blackcatdezines.com (the "Z" in designs was her idea, and mostly it's there because finding an available domain name in 2026 is very difficult). For now my wife seems to have cooled on the idea, though may come back to it, anyway I have been using the host for the show recordings, pointed all of the buttons on the web site to these files, and updated the podcast RSS feed to point to these as well. [Podcast] First, why are we still using the term "Podcast", who actually uses iPods in 2026? Well I was yesterday because I wanted to go for a walk and listen to music during the power outage and the only internet we had was my phone providing a mobile hotspot which my wife was using but I've gone off on a tangent. Obviously having a Podcast's RSS file URL constantly moving is a pain for anyone who subscribes. I've already had to move it once and put up a post on the old podcast feed to have users go find the new URL and subscribe to that. As you read on you'll see that I now need to do that yet again, hopefully for the last time. [More about the web site] Back to the web site because right now it's being thrown around like a hot potato. As long as a visitor always tries to go to https://chips-n-dip.com then everything will work fine, I can redirect that to whatever host is actually working and the page will just come up. The problem is that the way the redirect works the URL in the browser, once the page loads up, is wherever server is hosting the site at that time. So if the user bookmarks that page then they're not going to get bounced to the new host in the future if I change hosts and update the redirect. SDF's web hosting I don't want to use because a) PHP support is lacking, b) it's not super-reliable, and c) I feel I need to make it so that the show *will* go on every week at the scheduled time regardless of what technical difficulties are going on with other people's computers (divarin.net, sdf, anonradio). If my computers are down, or the power is down (which it was yesterday a couple of hours before showtime) then the show can't go on as scheduled. In addition I want the chips-n-dip.com url to be the actual URL shown in the browser which will fix the bookmarking issue and the podcast feed issue. I don't want people bookmarking divarin.net/chipsndip or sdf.org/~divarin1, or divarin1.sdf.org or anything like that. divarin.net doesn't allow me to point a second domain name to that host directly through DNS but blackcatdezines.com does. So that's the change I made this morning. It's going to take a while to trickle down to all of the DNS servers but eventually you should be able to go to https://chips-n-dip.com and it'll actually show that URL in the browser and you can actually bookmark that URL. As of this morning I'm using the host for blackcatdezines.com for chips-n-dip (thankfully they support my PHP code as is, no changes necessary). [Stream Changes] The "Listen Live" button on the page now pops up a small pop-up page which gives you two options: Click the play button on the player to stream Divarin Radio or click the link to listen to aNONradio. You no longer have to wait until 15 minutes before the show, you can click these two links anytime you want. Divarin Radio is constantly playing historical talk shows about computers and technology, mostly recorded in the 1990's. When it's approaching Chips 'n Dip time I will start my live stream (uploading to both Divarin Radio and aNONradio at the same time). If you're listening on Divarin Radio then in the minutes leading up to the start of the show I may play a few extra songs or even do some talking. If you're listening on aNONradio you won't hear Chips 'n Dip until my timeslot, obviously, but of course you can enjoy The Dubious Goals Committee with Tob, which I'll probably be doing myself at that time. As I mentioned in a previous Phlog there is a technical reason for this pre-show audio: The internet-radio service is designed to prevent streaming dead-air for long periods of time so even if you are uploading to the streaming server and someone else is listening, if there's no audio for too long then the server disables the stream until the audio resumes. This makes sense as it saves your bandwidth which I have to pay for. .