This is for the web, or what remains of it.
#Bookmarks #Web #Gemini #Gopher
Something strange is happening: it’s not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I’m blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I’m also disappearing for them. I don’t see them and they don’t see me! – Splitting the Web, by Ploum
Blogs
Movable Type didn’t just *kill* off blog customization. It (and its competitors) *actively* killed other forms of web production. Non-diarists — those folks with the old school librarian-style homepages — wanted those super-cool sidebar calendars just like the bloggers did. They were lured by the siren of easy use. So despite the fact that they *weren’t writing daily diaries*, they invested time and effort into migrating to this new platform. – How the Blog Broke the Web, by Amy Hoy
System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. The fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders. – Modern Font Stacks
It consists of twelve colours chosen with consideration for how we perceive hue, chroma, and luminance… – The 12-bit rainbow palette
How the Blog Broke the Web, by Amy Hoy
A theory of why some feel so strongly about the web’s demise:
From time to time, certain small groups of tech-savvy people happen to grow up in the same place and at the same time as certain powerful new technologies. Because of this unique background, these people - and these people alone - are able to very clearly perceive visions of the future which are both glorious and 100% technically feasible, the technical feasibility being something that they feel in their bones by virtue of direct experience, or at least direct observation. Those people therefore mistake these visions for being not just compelling but actually being inevitable, for being the obviously, undeniably natural and pre-destined state of the world, for being exactly what everybody else would want too, if only they understood things properly! But these futures aren’t inevitable, they’re actually mostly wishful thinking and they simply don’t come to pass. Space cadets and net cadets alike come crashing down to Earth, hard, and some get lifelong scars, not on their bodies, but in their souls. – Orphans of Netscape
Blogging in gemtext format:
A static blog generator written in a single fish script. – blg
Search:
With that in mind, I decided to test and catalog all the different indexing search engines I could find. I prioritized breadth over depth, and encourage readers to try the engines out themselves if they’d like more information. – A look at search engines with their own indexes, by Rohan Kumar
A look at search engines with their own indexes
@Sheril@mastodon.social says:
On days that the Internet seems particularly unpleasant, it’s helpful to remember that many of the individuals we encounter online aren’t real.
She links to this article from 2018:
Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head. – How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually., by Max Read
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
Web forms for a dedicated survey server, by @cblgh@merveilles.town:
Mould is an all-inclusive form builder and server that uses a custom syntax for succinctly declaring a form. – mould
The pressure of search:
But no matter what happens with Search, there’s already a splintering: a web full of cheap, low-effort content and a whole world of human-first art, entertainment, and information that lives behind paywalls, in private chat rooms, and on websites that are working toward a more sustainable model. As with young people using TikTok for search, or the practice of adding “reddit” to search queries, users are signaling they want a different way to find things and feel no particular loyalty to Google. – The Perfect Webpage, by Mia Sato, for The Verge
Small web site servers? @eli_oat@tenforward.social suggested Kirby and Yellow. Both are written in PHP. I didn’t see how Yellow makes money but you can order an installation. Interesting! Kirby has regular licensing keys.
Datenstrom Yellow is for people who make small websites. – Datenstrom Yellow
Kirby stores your content in simple text files. Folders are pages. Add images, documents and videos and you are ready to go. It’s that simple. – Kirby
On being weird:
Should we prioritize getting a new gig or selling a service? Or can we be ourselves? Weird and fun and peculiar? … But my question has always been this: how can we be both? – I am a poem I am not software, by Robin Rendle
Many, many links:
… a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.” – The internet used to be ✨fun✨
Not quite dead:
The professional writers monetizing their content have all migrated to Patreon or Substack or Medium. Yet here I am, blogging like it's still 2002 or 2008 or 2012. – Blogs Are Dead. Long Live Blogs!
Blogs Are Dead. Long Live Blogs!
WordPress:
As a WordPress developer, I’m often asked for advice when people have been struggling with an
issue for a long time. As widespread as WordPress is, there is almost always a tool that fits the
task perfectly. Usually, there are actually many possible solutions, but it’s time-consuming to try
them all. – My favourite WordPress backend plugins in 2024
My favourite WordPress backend plugins in 2024
JavaScript: Replace an element on-click, surprisingly powerful:
In a nutshell, htmz lets you swap page fragments on request using vanilla HTML. – htmz
Cookies:
You know those modal screens that interrupt your groove when you are surfing?
There are no laws forcing websites to use them.
They use them because they choose to.
– There is no EU cookie banner law
There is no EU cookie banner law
Search engines:
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web. – About Wiby
This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Marginalia
Stract is an open source search engine where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results. It's a search engine made for hackers and tinkerers just like ourselves. No more searches where some of the terms in the query arent used, and the engine tries to guess what you really meant. You get what you search for. – Stract: About Us
Clew maintains an independent index and is aiming to be a copyleft (APGLv3), self-hostable, privacy-respecting, customizable search engine which prioritizes independent creators/bloggers/writers and penalizes sites with ads and trackers. – Clew
Changes to Google Search doom sites:
Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under. – Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites
Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites
Ecology:
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. – We Need To Rewild The Internet, by @mariafarrell@mastodon.social, @robin@mastodon.social
We Need To Rewild The Internet
Tables good:
DataTables is a Javascript HTML table enhancing library. It is a highly flexible tool, built upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, that adds all of these advanced features to any HTML table. – DataTables
A small scale search engine, in Go:
Created in response to the environs of apathy concerning the use of hypertext search and discovery. In Lieu, the internet is not what is made searchable, but instead one's own neighbourhood. Put differently, Lieu is a neighbourhood search engine, a way for personal webrings to increase serendipitous connexions. – Lieu, by cblgh
Web page for Lieu:
Host your own niche, with friends. Write. Make sites. Tie them together. Cross-reference each other. Link to the people and things you love. Make it all searchable with an instance belonging to the small community you have created together. – Lieu
Makes me think I should do this for Emacs and role-playing games.
Mozilla failed us:
Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. … In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only: 1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees. 3. There is no 3. – Mozilla's Original Sin, by @jwz@mastodon.social
Browsers?
Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications. – Servo
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security. – Ladybird
Vanilla!
This is an overview of the major techniques used to make web sites and web applications without making use of build tools or frameworks, with just an editor, a browser, and web standards. – Plain Vanilla
The funny version of the same, I guess:
Vanilla JS is a fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework for building incredible, powerful JavaScript applications. – Vanilla JS
Better CSS:
To my surprise, I still see websites follow the adaptive design pattern, where it has a container that gets a new max-width value as per the viewport width. The term “responsive” means a lot of things now. We have media queries that check for user preferences, and modern CSS features that help us make a fluid layout without even using a media query. – The Guide To Responsive Design In 2023 and Beyond
The Guide To Responsive Design In 2023 and Beyond
@abundance@merveilles.town writes:
I’ve been updating my RSS feed manually for years now, and I’m never going back. All the normal sentiments about the handbuilt web, agency and control over websites, digital space as fundamentally human written homes, closeness and creative joy in making things on computers, etc, apply here. But also - *it’s so easy*. I cannot over emphasize what a relief it is to simply write the thing and have it go. – Handwriting your RSS feed
Text web:
HTML remains important:
I feel strongly that *anyone* should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way. – HTML is for people
In defence of feeds by @pluralistic@mamot.fr:
Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS … – You should be using an RSS reader
You should be using an RSS reader
Choice:
The result is a standardized internet experience across these platforms, decimating the richness that once characterized the open web. Consumers may believe they are choosing freely within these ecosystems, but in reality, they are selecting from a narrow range of options preordained by the platform. – The Internet is Shrinking, by Joan Westenberg (@Daojoan@mastodon.social)
Image formats:
WebP is an image file format based on the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) (Section 2) that supports lossless and lossy compression as well as alpha (transparency) and animation. It covers use cases similar to JPEG, PNG, and the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). – RFC 9649