Web Bookmarks

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

Fonts:

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

Colours:

It consists of twelve colours chosen with consideration for how we perceive luminance, chroma, and hue…

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-- The 12-bit rainbow palette

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

@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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

@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

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

Building a browser:

Web browsers are ubiquitous, but how do they work? This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a couple thousand lines of Python. -- Web Browser Engineering, by Pavel Panchekha & Chris Harrelson

The last 16 chapters have, I hope, given you a solid understanding of all of the major components of a web browser, from the network requests it makes to the way it stores your data safely. With such a vast topic I had to leave a few things out. Here’s my list of the most important things not covered by this book, in no particular order. JavaScript Execution … Text & Graphics Rendering … Connection Security & Privacy … Network Caching and Media … Fancier Layout Modes … Browser UIs and Developer Tools … Testing … -- What Wasn’t Covered, Conclusion A of Web Browser Engineering, by Pavel Panchekha & Chris Harrelson

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io about Wikipedia:

While some news outlets and other entities have proven willing to back down in the face of threats and demands from powerful figures (or has lacked the resources to do anything but), Wikipedia has not. This resilience against control helps explain why figures like Musk find Wikipedia so infuriating. They can buy platforms, threaten lawsuits, or pressure advertisers, but they cannot simply purchase or coerce control over Wikipedia. – Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia, by Molly White

Text user-interface via the web for weather forecasts: wttr.in.

@weekendspy@mastodon.nz posted a list of search systems for "books, science, other smart information":

• "RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers."
• "WorldCat is the world’s largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online."
• "Springer Nature Link delivers fast access to the depth and breadth of our online collection of journals, eBooks, reference works and protocols across a vast range of subject disciplines."
• "Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries."
• "RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is an initiative that seeks to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related areas. We want to make research more accessible both for the authors and the readers."
• "Science.gov provides access to millions of authoritative scientific research results from U.S. federal agencies."
• "BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. The index contains more than 400 million records from more than 11,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed records for free (Open Access)."

I thought I knew it all but there' still interesting edge cases in this article has a lot more about whitespace and HTML than I want to know. Amazing.

But as I dug into it more deeply, I found myself discovering complex design issues that I wanted to explore in a blog post. This is partially to write down my knowledge in this space for future reference and partially to vent about how unnecessarily complicated it all is. -- HTML Whitespace is Broken, by Doug of Devel without a Cause

Websites 1995–2005:

HTML was an almost democratizing force, giving a generation of people the tools they needed to stake their claim and plant their flag in the ground. The personal website was a statement of intent, a manifesto, a portfolio, a piece of digital architecture you could be damn proud of. – Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever, by Joan Westenberg

Firefox, oh Firefox. 😥

Whether or not one agrees with the outrage over the Terms of Use (TOU) changes, the fact remains that Mozilla is now in the advertising business. Use that information as you wish. -- Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke, by Liam Proven and Thomas Claburn, for The Register

Cloudflare checks the passwords used by the users of the websites they protect:

Our data analysis focuses on traffic from Internet properties on Cloudflare’s free plan, which includes leaked credentials detection as a built-in feature. … Our data reveals that approximately 41% of successful human authentication attempts involve leaked credentials. -- Password reuse is rampant: nearly half of observed user logins are compromised

@bookandswordblog@scholar.social writes about the decline of DuckDuckGo:

Search engines have been losing the battle against content farms for a decade or so. Around 1 March (2023 – ed.) I noticed that DuckDuckGo was including random things that it thought were physically close to my IP address in search results, things like maps, business directories, or local news stories that did not have most or any of the keywords but were things people might often click on. That made me look more into what DuckDuckGo actually is these days. – Does DuckDuckGo Want To Search the Web?

Microblogging using ssh. No web.

Social Media for Purists. -- itter.sh

@enocc@mastodon.social runs a feed aggregator for independent blogs:

It parses a list of RSS feeds submitted by its readers and generates a daily feed with the latest updates in each site going back a month. Up to 100 sites are selected each month, with every month showing different sites to provide all sites a fair chance of being discovered. – powRSS, by Pablo Enoc

@splitbrain@fedi.splitbrain.org runs a service that also posts random blog entries on fedi as @indieblog@indieweb.social:

This website lets you randomly explore the IndieWeb. Simply click the button below and you will be redirected to a random post from a personal blog. – indieblog.page, by Andreas Gohr

Domain names should be optional:

Just like we no longer have to remember someone’s phone number, we won’t have to remember their IP address either. We’ll just put it in our address book, next to the name of the person it belongs to, and use their name to visit their site. In fact, that’s really all the Domain Name System does for you, but instead of you owning the address book, ICANN does. – Web Numbers, by Aral Balkan

Let’s Encrypt writes:

The primary advantage of short-lived certificates is that they greatly reduce the potential compromise window because they expire relatively quickly. This reduces the need for certificate revocation, which has historically been unreliable. Our six-day certificates will not include OCSP or CRL URLs. Additionally, short-lived certificates practically require automation, and we believe that automating certificate issuance is important for security. … We will support including IP addresses as Subject Alternative Names in our six-day certificates. This will enable secure TLS connections, with publicly trusted certificates, to services made available via IP address, without the need for a domain name. – Announcing Six Day and IP Address Certificate Options in 2025

Moving away from HTTP/1.1? I liked that it's text-based but apparently there are soooo many exploits.

Upstream HTTP/1.1 is inherently insecure and regularly exposes millions of websites to hostile takeover. Six years of attempted mitigations have hidden the issue, but failed to fix it. -- HTTP/1.1 Must Die

@markwyner@mas.to suggested some pages on accessibility:

A web directory still exists.

Curlie strives to be the largest human-edited directory of the Web. It is run by volunteer editors. … We started as the Open Directory Project (ODP), later became DMOZ, and In 2017, we launched Curlie to continue the 100% free directory. There is no cost to submit a site to the directory or use the directory's data. – Curlie

@prahou@merveilles.town writes about Links2:

keyboard navigation, file association, searching for images, propaganda … – links2

To pay the cost or save on everything? @alexelcu@mastodon.social writes:

So tech blogs stopped having their own commenting widget, and those that continued to have comments, outsourced … Alongside comments, amongst dynamic features of blogs, other casualties were trackbacks and pingbacks … And yet another was the mailing list, outsourced … Facebook, 𝕏/Twitter, LinkedIn are deprioritizing links, which means that posts containing links will have a lower reach. Let me repeat that — social media silos are fighting against web links, the foundation of the open web. They do so to “encourage” content and discussions on their own platforms, noble goals a stakeholder would say, except that now these platforms are filled with politics, rage, and AI slop. – Outsourced Voices, Outsourced Minds, by Alexandru Nedelcu

Search engine for old computers:

The search functionality of FrogFind is basically a custom wrapper for DuckDuckGo search, converting the results to extremely basic HTML that old browsers can read. When clicking through to pages from search results, those pages are processed through a PHP port of Mozilla's Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I then further strip down the results to be as basic HTML as possible. – What in the world is FrogFind?

So where does one go for Gemini community? These are the places I visit, occasionally: