Re: Gemini Digest, Vol 23, Issue 40

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 07:38:42PM +0500, Anna “CyberTailor” wrote:
> I find these guidelines useful
> 
> => gemini://seirdy.one/2020/11/23/website-best-practices.gmi

Thanks for the shout-out; I was resisting the urge to self-promote :3. 
It's a living document that I update every now-and-then. Feedback is very welcome.

I wouldn't actually recommend reading too deeply into the article when 
just starting out; just try to keep your site relatively basic. Once your 
basic site is up, you can start going through the guidelines. The main 
theme is "simplicity leads to flexibility": the more "tech" you throw at 
your site, the more likely it is that someone in a niche situation is 
going to experience major issues.

The article actually borrows one idea from the philosophy behind Gemini: 
pages should respect the preferences of the user. Use the user's favorite 
fonts/colors (though maybe offer a dark stylesheet for users with darkmode 
enabled who use default settings) instead of "branding".

I'll probably update it this weekend. The image optimization section needs 
a bit of an overhaul since I switched from OxiPNG/ZopfliPNG to 
Efficient-Compression-Tool and started building libaom/avifenc with 
jpeg-xl's butteraugli tuning metric. I should also add some more advice on 
achieving good contrast with a dark background as per the Advanced 
Perceptual Contrast Algorithm: bluish colors on a black background have 
lower perceptual contrast than, say, yellowish colors. I should also 
recommend keeping CSS under 1.5kb and inlining it, since CSS is a 
render-blocking resource.

I also need to make an article about self-hosting. A well-tuned 
custom-built Nginx+OpenSSL/kernel combined with a good TLS setup can 
handle a few thousand req/sec on a multi-core low-power single-board computer.

Oh, and try to support IPv6. The cost of a fixed IPv4 address is typically 
a few bucks a month; a VPS is basically an add-on to your IPv4 address at 
that point. For the next decade or three, IPv4 servers aren't going 
anywhere, but we can at least try supporting both.

Make sure your site works over Tor. Bonus points for offering a hidden 
service to eliminate the need for an exit node.

-- /Seirdy

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