Want to show visitors to your site that your content is human made and doesn't use AI? Grab my badge pack for FREE (or pay as much as you want)
The pack contains 64 88x31px PNG and SVG badges in 8 colors and phrases “made by a human, drawn by a human, human content, written by a human, I am not a robot, never by ai, human content, there's no ai here!”
while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)
They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.
i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?
what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.
some of you know that i've been working on a decentralized reddit-like that uses an ancient ambrosian protocol called nntp, minus #usenet, called #tomo
after several requests for a project status page, and lacking the courage to build a fancy web portal that is 190mb and 20,000 javascript calls, i did the exact opposite:
i stayed up until 2am and wrote a #homepage is absolute raw satan-approved php. it generates the webpages from text files with a tiny markup language i wrote at the same time
for now, the tomo homepage is a plain old .plan file (when's the last time we heard that word, since the carmack vs romero wars?), and you can have any colour you want as long as it's amber and looks like wordperfect 5.1 running on some godforsaken library terminal on the #worldwideweb
is it like a blog? kinda. i'll set up some more static pages for project-related stuff in the coming days
if people really, really want to, and someone asks nicely, i'll even run a fingerd server so you can finger me and pull down the .plans down yourself 😅
after watching doug block's Home Page (1999) documentary a half-dozen times over the past year, i realized how much i missed having a personal home page.
not an itch.io page. not a github repo. not an imgur album.
an actual personal home page full of links to interesting places and people, and a little blog area to write personal stuff in. i haven't had a personal blog since the early 2000s.
i wanted to have some fun, so I hauled my dusty ol' iMac G5 out of storage and installed Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks. i hadn't used any of them in almost 20 years.
i thought it might take me a week to build a home page...
... it took me a year 😅
so this is my little attempt at rebuilding what we lost in the 90s. let me know if you've got a little homepage i can link back to in my hyperlinks area.
Anyone here know anyone from Paddle that you can put me in touch with? (Or share your experience with them?)
I’m reconsidering whether Stripe is the right solution for the initial payments option in Domain (https://codeberg.org/domain/app) or whether it makes more sense (and would be easier for folks who want to run their own Domain instances and become Small Web hosts) if I integrated a Merchant of Record (MoR) solution instead.
Coming soon: it’s going to be trivial to deploy a different app on your Small Web server. Useful if you’re a dev and you’re playing around with different apps.
(Also, notice the speed at which deployment happens. I’m one step away from implementing this in Domain using pre-warmed Kitten instances – called toasty kittens – thereby bringing the time it takes to deploy your own Small Web place down to a handful of seconds.)
Right, I’m back to focussing on Domain* now that another round of dev is complete on Kitten** and, two years after I originally asked the question: does anyone know of a comparable service to Hetzner Cloud (API, affordable, very quick server setup, VPS) that supports CoreOS?
I still can’t find any. And my attempts to get Hetzner to support it have failed (mostly due to lack of interest on Fedora’s side) 🤷♂️
So did I mention that no company or government pays me for the work I do?
But you can support my work if you want to live in a world where we have the Small Web as an alternative to the Big Web of Google, Facebook, and other people farmers.
Great, it looks like whatever they changed in Chrome no longer trusts Kitten’s¹ local certificate authority (installed and trusted by the system trust store, as you’d do in a spit enterprise).
Applies to previously trusted and working certificates too.
(The directly related module is Auto Encrypt Localhost²)
Going to look into it today and see if I can’t find a workaround.
Very excited about the latest feature/workflow I’m adding to Kitten. I call it… 🥁
✨ Streaming HTML ✨
Implement back-end functionality and stream HTML updates to the client without writing any front-end JavaScript.
Just give your forms names and listen for them in an onConnect() handler you export from your page. Kitten handles everything else – setting up a WebSocket route for you, mapping triggers to events, etc. – thanks to Kitten + #htmx magic 🪄
Show visitors to your site that your content is human made and doesn't use AI!
Grab my badge pack for FREE (or pay as much as you want to help fund future stuff)
The pack contains 64 88x31px PNG and SVG badges in 8 colors and phrases “made by a human, drawn by a human, human content, written by a human, I am not a robot, never by ai, human content, there's no ai here!”
I’ve been looking for an ngrok alternative for a while now that’s (a) affordable (b) easy to use and (c) works with Kitten¹. Today, after testing a bunch of them again and getting fed up, I found LocalXpose that checks all the boxes.
I signed Small Technology Foundation up as an affiliate so if you use this link to check it out, we’ll get 40% of your $6/mo pro account fee should you subscribe:
Looking forward to finally getting back to work today after breaking my hand and recovering from a mild bout of the latest strain of COVID (I’m assuming – at least two other folks who were with us tested positive even though neither Laura nor I did over multiple tests) while away in Spain at the start of the month.
There’s a big update to Kitten deployments in the works in its own branch that will also bring about a bunch of other improvements when it lands.
In case you’re wondering how little old Kitten performs in the tests of the Big Boys…
(And that’s from a development build of a Domain page, not a deployment build so no compression, live reload script in page, etc.)
Turns out it’s pretty easy to ace such tests when you’re not spending cycles and code doing horrible things to people in your web pages (like tracking their every move and attempting to exploit their behaviour for profit). 🤔
A fifteen-second demo of how you can create a toast message in 42 lines of code¹ without writing any client-side JavaScript using Streaming HTML² in Kitten³.
Yes, that‘s it, the two hearts emoji, that’s the new logo.
“Wait, what?! That’s not a logo, anyone can copy and use that!”
Sure, go right ahead. We’re not playing the same game as Big Tech with their trademarks and whatnot :)
PS. I just updated the placeholder site at https://small-web.org with the new logo and the Small Web protocol will use it as the namespace. e.g., my.small-web.site/💕/id → my identity (ed25519 public key for the cryptography nerds) :)
Bloody hell, someone just made a €1,024 donation to Small Technology Foundation.
Umm, thank you, whomever you are, we really appreciate it :)
(And thank you to everyone who supports us with a monthly patronage and with one-off donations. It may not pay the rent but it does help us to keep existing and continue working on realising the Small Web with Kitten¹ and Domain².)
Is there any TLD registry (not registrar) and accompanying domain name extension (.com, .net and so on) out there that’s owned by a small/independent, i.e. trustworthy business? Feels like they’re all owned by some creepy mega-corp.
.blog owned by Automattic is a decent example, though they’re not exactly very indie anymore, and have come under strong scrutiny of late. I wonder if there are even better alternatives.
Heads up in case any of you are playing with Kitten¹, I’m going to implement a major API change today (it’s still pre-release/experimental so expect these things… though there should be fewer with time):
Instead of your routes receiving positional arguments like this: