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.
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 incidents with wiki spam and some (numerous!) errant web spiders
pounding the server , it could not keep up.

To keep costs down and restore performance, I decided to move away from (the dynamic)
mediawiki to a static site, which from experience I knew 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.

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!

Back story

The story of ConShell.

The inspiration for Conshell came fro the conch shell, a symbolic feature in the book
"Lord of the Flies" by William Golding.

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.