Tag: web
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Webpage Copy-Protection is Impossible (and that's great!)
A friend of mine was inconvenienced by an over-eager bit of Web copy-protection JavaScript this week, and it reminded me that more-than-ever, these scripts are both harmful (to legitimate users) and pointless (ineffective at preventing downloading).
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Weird Web October 2026 (Christopher Kennedy-Nuñez)
I love Weird Web October, and Christopher's off to an amazing start this year: well worth a look at his wacky projects for the month (and trying to find the cat in each one: I've managed!) before you go check out what everybody else who's participating is up to. Also... I might be about to join in!
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Re: Domains Cost More, Blogs Disappear
While bemoaning the rising cost of domain names, Michael also observed that blogging and personal websites are suffering a lack of young newcomers. In my reply I disagree, saying that they're there... just not where he's looking for them!
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My newly-revamped personal site has an almost full suite of slash pages; something I'd been meaning to do for a while:
Still no /now, but I'll get that sorted someday, perhaps!
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Styling :visited links using hue-rotation
My new site theme offers a :visited link style, but for convenience it's based on a CSS hsl-transformation. Here's how it works...
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After months of minor tweaks, on-and-off, I finally bit the bullet and hit "publish" on my new theme for DanQ.me. It's not perfect; it's got all kinds of bugs... but what's the point of having a personal webite if you can't trash it once in a while with an ill-advised "fun" rework, right?
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Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).
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Here's a neat trick. I've got a web page with many HTML popovers, styled as modals to create a no-JS gallery/lightbox. But LCP suffers because the browser tries to reserve space for the images within (even though they're within not-yet-shown popovers).
This CSS one-liner saved the day. It basically says "skip over not-yet open popovers on initial page render" -
[popover]:not(:popover-open) {
content-visibility: hidden;
}I appreciate that Lighthouse isn't the last word in performance metrics, of course. But this change alone bumped an affected page's score from 76 to 100, so it's not nothing either!
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Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)
A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!
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WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!
25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...
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Re: How I made...
Noah S shared how he used some PHP code to block specific badly-behaved bots from his website. I've got a few suggestions to help him make his block faster, easier-to-maintain, and more-thorough, either using PHP code or webserver configuration.
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Pixel Area (@pxlarea@mastodon.social) launched a couple of weeks ago, and DanQ.me was selected to be one of the initial "seed" blogs that were there at the outset (I'm at https://pxlarea.com/x38y34).
I'm... honestly not sure what to make of it. Organising personal websites spatially seems like a strange idea (although there's a list view available too). And 'pixel' seems to be a strange name (at my desktop resolution, my 'pixel' comprises... 169 pixels). It's got a little bit of a "million dollar homepage" (remember that) feel to it... though at least it's not operating commercially. In fact, the best thing about it seems to be that it's home-grown indie/smolweb content.
I guess it's a bit like a webring? (Maybe it needs an embeddable component that lets a site show it's "space" and hop to neighbours?)
So... yeah; I'm undecided on this one. But, as always, I love when people do cool, random and experimental stuff with the Web!
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Screenshot from Pixel Area, showing a blue 'pixel' representing Dan Q.
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Use Firefox
Ramkumar Shankar says you should use Firefox, and they're right: you should. Not just because it's a great browser, and it is, but because doing so helps protect the freedom and openness of the Web. Use Firefox.
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The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto
Jim Mitchell shared The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto. And it's excellent.
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How I (Don't) Collect Blog Statistics
I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better.
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Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?