Versioning API by including the version in MIME type. Never thought of that before!

This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it's targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM's - but really, like the plants it is named after, it'll eat just about anything that finds it's way inside.

It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse.

THIS IS DELIBERATELY MALICIOUS SOFTWARE INTENDED TO CAUSE HARMFUL ACTIVITY. DO NOT DEPLOY IF YOU AREN'T FULLY COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

ntfy is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API.

curl \
  -d "Backup successful 😀" \
  ntfy.sh/mytopic

Free notifications!

UPD. Used it in my SystemD service files to notify me of service restarts. It was extremely easy to do so. Will use it for now, until I migrate to a proper monitoring system.

/.well-known/avatar resolving to an image. Edge cases not considered at all. Might implement

an extremely based frontend manual from the GOV.UK

Every website and app these days relies on so-called “social markup,” metadata for a richer and prettier display in social media and messaging tools. On the absolute minimum you may need.

How to convert your existing website into a progressive web app.

An ever growing list of links questioning the JavaScript paradigm

RapidAPI for Mac is a full-featured HTTP client that lets you test and describe the APIs you build or consume. It has a beautiful native macOS interface to compose requests, inspect server responses, generate client code and export API definitions.

Grishka recommended me this for HTTP probing. It helped me!

A less profane and Oedipal manifesto for a better World Wide Web

Matthew teaches us how to make websites. I like this one better than the other one because it's, well, “less profane”.

From table hacks to CSS kludges, these are some of the techniques that helped web developers get their fancy pages on the internet.

We've read tens of articles like this. Let's read another one!

Principles to make building web software easier, faster and more inclusive.

Tedu's little funky web libraries!

Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making websites and products more sustainable. Following these guidelines which utilize environment, social, and governance (ESG) principles throughout the decision-making processes, you can minimize your environmental impact through a mixture of user-centered design, performant web development, renewable infrastructure, sustainable business strategy, and (with metrics) various combinations of those mentioned. It should be noted that these guidelines will not address every possible mechanism or strategy to become sustainable, as such, these guidelines (which are notably Web orientated and focused) should be seen as a starting point in a sustainability journey (coverage does not extend for example to manufacturing or shipping of physical products). Following these guidelines will often make Web content more accessible, usable, and performant as a by-product.

Big text!

What can be left out.

You may not use XHTML (anymore), but when you write HTML, you may be more influenced by XHTML than you think. You are very likely writing HTML, the XHTML way.

I never really used XHTML, but this article lists some useful tricks with HTML.

No div!

A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.

Version 2.0 specification defines a set of files required to describe an API. These files can then be used by the Swagger-UI project and Swagger-Codegen. Learn more.

Weblite attempts to provide simplified specifications for HTML, CSS, XML for the simpler web. In idea, if you stick to these specs, your site will work like in every browser, including the small ones.

I both pity and admire beginner web coders of today. Unlike me, they've not been able to accumulate gradual knowledge of HTTP, HTML, REST, JavaScript, the DOM, CSS, AJAX, JSON, asynchronous execution and event driven object oriented programming over a period of decades. They haven't walked the long path from CGI scripts to modern server side tomfoolery via PHP, ASP and various MVC frameworks. They're just brutally thrust into a complex world of Gulp, Grunt, TypeScript, React Hooks and MobX-State-Tree and it's assumed they somehow already know about all that other stuff. Computer Science has moved into the frontend in earnest and yet it still seems as if many view "web development" as "making homepages", and that it's something you can learn over a period of weeks, not years.

In retrospect, web development has always been a bit of a struggle against the powers that be.
Some things that were pretty bad for quite a long time have gotten better. But, on the whole, I dare say it's much worse now than when I started. Much like how Commodore 64 programmers could keep a map of the entire computer in their head, a moderately competent developer could churn out an acceptable web site in a matter of weeks, understand every single aspect of it and get paid in the process. If I, a quarter century ago, had possessed the experience and knowledge I do now, the simplicity of those early web pages would've felt surreal. And yet, we apparently provided a service that was of some value to some people. A digital commodity, nothing more, nothing less. Actually useful software.

The author tells us that CGI is good and should be used a lot.

One of my most favorite technical blogs out there. The author has an excellent taste in everything. I've been following him for years.

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