Metamath website changes

[David A. Wheeler]

I'm starting to modify the Metamath website.

One immediate change: us.metamath.org now supports TLS certificates, so
<https://us.metamath.org> now works! Going to metamath.org will redirect to
<https://us.metamath.org/mm.html> (the https version instead of the http) version.

The "us.metamath.org" site is hosted on Linode, but the website *generation*
is currently on a computer in Norm's former home (us2.metamath.org), which
his former partner does not want to keep running. My current plan is to
make the generation *also* occur on us.metamath.org.

--- David A. Wheeler

[Jim Kingdon]

Excellent news on the https . I clicked around for a while and didn't
find any links which had broken in the process.

And thank you for all your work on this. As usual, let me know if there
is anything I can help with, or if moral support is needed, consider
this email an expression of appreciation.

[David A. Wheeler]

> On Jul 17, 2022, at 9:06 PM, Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> Excellent news on the https . I clicked around for a while and didn't find any links which had broken in the process.
>
> And thank you for all your work on this. As usual, let me know if there is anything I can help with, or if moral support is needed, consider this email an expression of appreciation.

Moral support is always welcome! Please let me know of problems as I try to fix things up.

I've created a new repo with the scripts to handle things:
https://github.com/metamath/metamath-website-scripts

I'm set things up to directly pay the various fees for website & registration.
I hope we can eventually create a "Metamath Association" that can handle the fees
and generally make sure that this stuff can outlive us... but that's for another day.

Details below.

--- David A. Wheeler


===== Details =======

My goal is to have scripts that can completely recreate a site that either:
1. generates the pages itself, or
2. mirrors pages from somewhere else.

Currently us.metamath.org is really just a mirror of rsync.metamath.org
("rsync" is the same system as us2.metamath.org), but we don't have scripts
that can really recreate a mirror. So I'm starting there - that way, we will have
confidence that we can recreate a simple working site. I think the only thing
not yet handled is configuring the web server (nginx)... that still seems to
be hand-jammed.

The next step is to figure out the scripts to *generate* the web pages.
I intend to have the generation run as a non-root user
(running complicated programs as root is a bad idea).

--- David A. Wheeler