About ConShell

History

https://conshell.net was started in 2008.

You can find a snapshot of the original website at the Wayback machine.

The primary author of this site's content is Mark Foster (mark@foster.cc) aka Delimiter.

Over the years a handful of contributors have helped with corrections and additions. A huge thank you goes out to all of you!

This was made possible by the fact the site was running the open-source Wiki software MediaWiki, which is the same software used by the infamous Wikipedia

Alas, in spring 2026 after some irritating incidents with wiki spam and some annoying web clients/spiders overloading the server with random, un-referred requests, it was time for a change.

To keep costs down and restore performance, I decided to move away from (the dynamic) mediawiki to a static site, which I knew from experience could keep up with the load much better, and deliver pages faster.

This was accomplished by exporting all of the pages into Obsidian and converting to proper markdown. Once there, I deployed Kiln to generate (render) the pages of the site, and Rsync the content up to the server using a Makefile (Make).

The site itself is served by Nginx.

The TLS certificate is generated and renewed using certbot & LetsEncrypt.

Thank you for reading and visiting this site!

--Delimiter 2026-05-22

Back story

The inspiration for the name "Conshell" came from the conch shell, a symbolic feature in the book "Lord of the Flies".

The characters in the story would hold the conch shell when they wanted to speak. It was also blown to gather the tribe and announce meeting.