tl;dr - Cogs' Kludge is a conglomeration of all the stuff I could acquire at the lowest possible prices in order to bring all my most amazing thoughts to the world. It's one of the many things I do to keep my aging brain active and stave off Alzheimer's. I'm not sure it works though.
The long version:
Way back in the days before Covid, when Neil Armstrong and Larry Hagman still roamed the Earth, a work colleague whom I will call Dallas was banging on about HP Microservers and their usefulness to geeks. Dallas had bought one, and was insistent that for $239 I should do the same. It was a solution I didn't have a problem for, so I bought one. Little did I know that thing would become the centrepiece of my rapidly expanding home network, and still be there chugging away 10 years later.
Inside is a dual core AMD Turion II Neo running at 1.5GHz, 4GB ECC RAM, and 4 x 2TB SATA drives. Not a rocket ship by any means, but ultra low power, quiet and reliable.
And of course well built and easy to access for repairs and upgrades.
Next up was the need for an operating system, and in what I think may have been a moment of philanthropy for Microsoft they were offering a fair dinkum real Server OS for $49. It was called Windows Home Server 2011, and under its thinly veiled disguise was actually Server 2008 R2 pre-configured and very slightly crippled for home use. It was designed to be as simple as possible for home users to set up, having them automatically backing up their PCs, serving media and files, and offering secure remote access. It was quite brilliant, so much so that it was the second of only two versions that Microsoft created. I guess that philanthropic urge ran out. Soon I discovered that remote access was serviced by the bundled web server, MS IIS. Not as popular as Apache, but up there with the big guns. And yep, it was exposed and usable in all its glory so my inner nerd had to put it to use.
And so, Cogs' Kludge was born.
Internet plan with static IP, no blocked ports and unlimited data - check.
Free DNS using NoIP's hopto.org domain name - check.
In depth knowledge of html and a killer web app idea - err, not check.
I did have a weather station though that connects to the awesome weather app, Cumulus, which generates ready to go web pages, a good start and something to learn with. I decided I wanted a home page with links to all the must visit sites I was about to create, or not as it turns out, and I entrusted that job to MS Word. Yes, it made "working" html, but in hindsite I've never seen such a mass of incomprehensible and unnecessary code as the spew that came out of it. My home page ended up looking like this:
A couple of years on and I had decided to try apps in different languages. A web proxy sounded like something that might actually be useful to the outside world, and a bit of fun to administer. Glype was the one I settled on, written in PHP and at the time being actively developed. I didn't advertise the proxy at all, just quietly put a link to it on my MS Word kludge of a home page and let the search engines bring it to the world. Within 2 months it was receiving 20,000 hits a day, but had dropped back into the hundreds another month later. It trickled along like this for 6 months and then exploded again, and I discovered it had been listed on a proxy index site and had a high reliability and speed ranking. I couldn't rest on this, I had to keep it interesting and add value to hopefully keep my visitors this time. I had also placed Google Ads on all but the proxied pages, in line with Google's terms, and needed to keep the traffic flowing to generate revenue. I learned a bit about PHP and HTML, enough to add a few simple features to the proxy, and added a killer feature that really set the wheels in motion. Most free web proxies were not encrypted, traffic could be snooped by middle-men which negated one of the benefits of a proxy, privacy. I fixed that with SSL, I bought a cheap SSL certificate which assured an end to end encrypted link from my users to the proxy and advertised this on the proxy index that had found the original.
Fast forward another 2 months and it had become unstoppable. Users actually started using the feedback form to thank me, and the Google ads were generating enough revenue to cover my internet costs. Win - win!
Until it wasn't.
Google shut me down without warning or explanation, something I later discovered was a common occurrence. They advised only that my AdSense account was terminated permanently for violations of their terms, I could never be a Google advertiser again. Ah well, that's life, but the proxy lived on.
For almost 3 more years the proxy thrived, receiving anything up to 50,000 hits per day, and that little HP MicroServer never missed a beat. The traffic was almost exclusively facebook, and I suspect it was mostly used by school kids behind firewalls that were blocking social media. No, I didn't feel guilty, I was assisting the world with freedom of choice! But the world wide web was changing. More and more active content and sophisticated sites were appearing, that just didn't work well or at all in the proxy. The developer was continually releasing plugins to overcome site problems until one day he just gave up. Glype was officially dead. My "thank you" contacts became, "can you please make the proxy work at ...", to which I had to reply, "no, sorry". I made the difficult decision to shut it down, gave my users a couple of months notice, and on 17th June 2018 pulled the plug. Its final served page was https://m.facebook.com/friends/center/mbasic/?fb_ref=tn&sr=1&ref_component=mbasic_home_header&ref_page=%2Fwap%2Fhome.php&refid=7, whatever that is.
Another platform that caught my attention is .NET, and I found an excellent free image gallery app written using it called Gallery Server Pro. This became the third feature of Cogs' Kludge, but being a complete working and comprehensive package did not prove to be the learning experience I hoped it might be. It's just useful. I've used it to host photos and graphics for forum posts, to share photos with friends and family, and to share scans from magazines with fellow enthusiasts. It still lives in the Kludge today.
With the proxy gone for more than three years now the Kludge has felt incomplete, and I've been wanting to ditch the awful MS Word home page and create something better. Some unidentified thing inspired me recently, and with the help of the comprehensive tutorials and references at W3 Schools I've rebuilt it from scratch. I've attempted to follow the guidelines surrounding "responsive" web design to hopefully allow the page to render well on any size screen, and I think I've done OK. I've also used some HTML5 features to make the page just that little bit dynamic, and again I think it adds interest to an otherwise quite featureless page. Let me know what you think, if you wish! All feedback is appreciated.
This bring us to today, and the need for an all new compelling content section on Cogs' Kludge. Why not a blog, and since PHP is already a thing on the mighty HP, this is a no brainer. Once again I went on the search, and found a suitable candidate called DotClear. That's what you're looking at right now. It's brand new and shiny, just waiting to fill up with content. I don't think I'll do many of the more traditional blog type posts, I've been duplicating some of the more technical answers I've posted on Quora over the years and hope these will capture some attention and generate discussion. There will be times that I'll be inspired to write about something that interests me, or am opinionated about, but not often. I don't expect this blog to be an explosion of creativity but I do hope that it finds at least some readers. Like the proxy I'm not doing anything to generate traffic, this will stand on its own merit and be a learning experience for the nerdy hominid that owns it.
Thanks for reading.