Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2024-10)

Some of my BibTeX (.bib) bibliography files are not pure 7-bit ASCII. Any such characters should be encoded as LaTeX symbols/escapes, to allow good rendering in LaTeX documents, translation to HTML equivalents, and to avoid breaking various tools.

I noticed the issue when creating a Zenodo backup of the full bibliography.

150 lines out of about 5710 are affected:

% wc -l db.bibliography/general.bib
5710 db.bibliography/general.bib
% awk '/[^ -~]/' < db.bibliography/general.bib | wc -l
158

I am doing a rather painful mainly-manual clean-up, and cleaning up some other annoyances such as leading spaces in records.

I am taking a leaf out of the Clean Energy Wire book, and making all texts created for EOU and not otherwise explicitly licensed or restricted available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Our DrayTek router was open to remote hijacking so I updated it from 3.9.1.3_BT to 3.9.9.7_STD.

I made a couple of other tiny tweaks such as pointing the router at the new name for our NTP server, and changing its regular reboot time to be marginally less annoying.

I have captured the firmware ZIP and new config in my system repository, which means that there are copies on my laptop and server.

The silencing of ETag and If-None-Match for EOU has overall 304 "Not modified" responses to Googlebot as reported in GSC at 31% (ie still rising), and 73% for the m-dot site specifically.

This is likely reducing energy consumption for Google and the EOU server while maintaining an up-to-date index.