Intersting web projects

You can create a Twilio trial account also to explore this project.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/471042

> You can also download an awesome live wallpaper.

Just wondering: is there a service where you can replace the domain of a YouTube URL with, that will automatically redirect you to a random, well-running Invidious or Piped instance? That way we automatically spread out the load to more instances.

Same question for other Alternative Client projects like Nitter for Twitter, Teddit & Libreddit for Reddit, ScribeRip for Medium, etc?

Example: I want to be able to take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and turn it into something like https://altclient.to/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and then have that URL redirect to any one of the popular Invidious or Piped clients, like https://yewtu.be/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ or https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ​

I'm aware of LibRedirect, but it's a browser extension for a single user. I want to be able to post a URL, say on Lemmy, and have it auto-redirect to a random instance for everyone that clicks in it. My main goal is to help balance out the load on all the instances so the most popular one isn't just swamped with requests while all the others are basically never used.

If there isn't, I might just build it. Shouldn't be too hard.

The 10 KB Club is a curated collection of websites whose home pages do not exceed 10 KB compressed size.

This is a service I created to consume RSS feeds via email. This has been my preferred way to consume RSS for a while but I never found a service that I was really happy with and no self-hosted tool easy enough to manage.

So I created FeedMail mostly for myself but decided to share with others. I would appreciate feedback and any questions you have.

I immediately went to their Patreon to back despite having very little interest in creating this kind of content myself. If anyone knows of a resource to keep abreast of new things people are making with it, I'm all ears!

via nathalie lawhead's talk on web art which perfectly sums up why we should find stuff like this exciting

It's an art class, let's get that out of the way up top: maybe not for everyone. And it's teaching dead-basic coding skills in its projects, so they're not necessarily of interest. But that syllabus--I'm going to be spending a while with it.

Sometimes I feel a flicker of jealousy for the Really Smart People who got to take classes like this, ponder over material like this, discuss with other Really Smart People... But there are two points that console me: first, that I don't have Yale MFA debt behind me, and second, that if I can nurture the habits I need to pursue such studies as an autodidact, I have an increasing amount of life experience to bring to bear on the material.

Hmm. Lacks social grounding, doesn't it? But I'm not sure where would be appropriate to discuss the readings, so I'll leave that aside for now...

Most people interested in PWAs have been looking forward to desktop support, but Mozilla is removing the prototype feature for it and has no plans for any other desktop PWA features. I want to use Firefox, but Mozilla keeps doing the exact opposite of what I want.

I don't know why, but I have this feeling that these kinds of communities are the only good future of the web. That isn't to say quirky and Linux-based -- but intentional, social, donation-based, with a hodgepodge of shared amenities.

Using Hypothesis, we can annotate on any sentences in any web pages and PDF files.

Email something to be burned in a dumpster fire

Chris Aldrich was posting about something like this and I realized that I don't think I've shared this since using it for my latest attempt to Get Into RSS. Feed import / export remains pretty garbage for RSS readers once you get enough feeds that categories are essential... but we work with what we have.

For me, it was cool because I've tried for a long time to follow a lot of non-dudes in tech. After this OPML file was generated, I went through and found a lot more blogs / sites of those people than I'd expected!

If your Twitter follow list is anything like mine, I recommend manually verifying that people have posted within the last year or so before adding them to whatever your canonical RSS feed list is.

Hi, since I'm currently looking for a CSS library to use on one of my projects and eventually a blog as well, I thought I'd ask you guys and gals for your favourite minimal CSS libraries.

What do you like most about that library? In your eyes, what are attributes a good CSS library should have?

I thought I was going to like this piece. But it sits wrong with me, because it's almost right and then swerves.

Yes, people put a bunch of dumb stuff on their webpages. Why? Because, well, that's what someone else had on their Wordpress install. They don't consider carefully the needs of their particular visitors, and they don't consider carefully about the overall impression they're trying to give.

But instead of pointing people to think about these things, Babauta offers a different prescription. You thought you wanted your blog to look like a cluttered Wordpress blog because that's what you thought blogs should look like--well, instead your blog should look like his blog. His preferences are your readers' preferences.

It doesn't take too many examples to point out the cases where this breaks down.

> [leave out] related posts

That's not optimizing for a minimal website, that's optimizing for the presentation of a single document. Those "related posts" dingamerbobbers are how I get a feel for a person's blog--is their post about their dog training struggles a temporary aside from their normal OCaml content, or are there more cute pictures of the puppy? As a reader, I'm not necessarily considering navigating around just because I've read one thing; it isn't a dark pattern to suggest I do! Maybe your beautifully crafted article isn't quite addressing my point of interest, and I'd see you have a more relevant one.

> the numbers don’t matter that much. What matters is helping your readers, delighting them, changing their lives.

I don't mean to be glib, but: do you not care about helping more people? It obviously doesn't make sense for, e.g., a fiction writer to be A/B testing protagonists, but plenty of people incorporate analytics into the methods through which they're trying to create content that will be useful to people. Yes, really. (a really good piece on someone's particular writing process)

> short urls (without .php, .asp, .aspx, .html, dates, categories or other items in the url) — see the url of the posts on this site as an example

What a specific personal preference to present as a best practice! Non-technical folks are typically just as comfortable/uncomfortable with basename.example/thoughtful-title-painfully-made-unique as with basename.example/2020/07/21/title-keyword as with basename.example/7887c899-fee8-430a-b6e3-ca0841197497 -- no matter which feels most hygienic to a developer -- with or without .html appended. If you're not able to create tiny titles for your content (and if you write on similar topics frequently, good luck with that) it's all going to be a non-semantic blob to your user.

> Good discussion of the post can be continued elsewhere, such as on Twitter or Facebook or other people’s blogs, if they find the post worth talking about.

Oh, that's user-friendly -- "yes, people have made thoughtful points about this piece of writing that add to it; have fun finding them!"

Sponsored content is bad? Even this, not always! I love the sponsored content this preserves-blogger does with Ball and different fruit associations. It fits in well and it's just as useful as it'd be unsponsored.

My point here isn't that you need three similar posts linked at the bottom, or a particular analytics script, or a specific taxonomy of URLs, or that comments sections and sponcon are great. It's that if you're actually trying to focus on the experience you're giving visitors to your website, you can't rely on anyone's sense of "well this is what works well for websites in general," whether minimalist or maximalist. You have to know what you're trying to do, and you have to consider carefully how the pieces come together to do it.

Do you have a computer? Great! You can use it to help humanity by running scientific calculations on it when you're not using it! There are two major platforms, BOINC which does all kinds of science from medicine to physics to astronomy and even non-science ones depending on which projects you decide to contribute to, and Folding@Home which mainly focuses on protein research, both maintained by prominent universities (but serve scientists all over the world). Simply install either client (or both), and follow their instructions! You can set conditions for when they can compute so as to not conflict with your own computer use. It's completely painless and allows you to donate both CPU and GPU power!

One piece of advice I have is to be careful when running them on a battery powered device as the heat generated can damage the battery. You can set limits on how much processing power is used though, and there are even third party tools at least for BOINC that can limit computation by system temperature.

Finally, about COVID-19 research. Here are the projects available on BOINC that deal with it, and this is Folding@Home's information page on its involvement!

If you have a PC at all, whether it's considered powerful or not, I implore you to install at least one of these and donate its unused computing power to scientific endeavours, COVID-19 research is especially in need right now! Every contribution counts, no matter how small!

I like this more than you'd think; my whole website is an extended exercise of Doing Cool Stuff with CSS and HTML generated from Markdown, but I always feel a little uncomfortable doing anything too fun when userstyles are not common practice. I could totally create a style switcher with Javascript, but... wouldn't it be better if that were built into the client?

Reader mode in Firefox is what I'd like to fall back to, but it doesn't handle my footnotes right now. :(

it has 129 posts so I'm going to reopen it. if someone wants to take over as mod please let me know

A simplified take on discussion, image and link sharing.

https://pavellaptev.github.io/web-dark-ages/

https://small-tech.org/videos/creative-mornings-istanbul/

Read articles from your favorite websites and blogs in one place: https://paperpup.herokuapp.com/

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v13/104