If you’ve ever found yourself missing the “good old days” of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret “it” broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings?
etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I’m working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
I miss the era of personal web sites started out of genuine admiration for something, rather than out of a desire to farm a few advertising pennies
This. You wanted to identify a song? Type some of the lyrics into a search engine and hope that somebody transcribed the same lyrics onto their fansite. You needed to know a fact?
Better hope some guru had taken the time to share it, or it’d be time for a trip to the library
Not having information instantly easy to find meant that you really treasured your online discoveries. You’d bookmark the best sites on whatever topics you cared about and feel no
awkwardness about emailing a fellow netizen (or signing their guestbook to tell them) about a resource they might like. And then you’d check back, manually, from time to time to see
what was new.
The young Web was still magical and powerful, but the effort to payoff ratio was harder, and that made you appreciate your own and other people’s efforts more.
When was the last time you tested your website in a text-only browser like Lynx (or ELinks, or one of
several others)? Perhaps you
should.
I’m a big fan of CSS Naked Day. I love the idea of JS Naked Day, although I missed it earlier this month (I was busy abroad, plus my aggressive caching,
including in service workers, makes it hard to reliably make sweeping changes for short periods). I’m a big fan of the idea that, for the vast majority of websites, if it isn’t at least
usable without any CSS or JavaScript, it should probably be considered broken.
This year, I thought I’d celebrate the events by testing DanQ.me in the most-limited browser I had to-hand: Lynx. Lynx has zero CSS or JavaScript support, along with limited-to-no support for heading levels, tables, images, etc. That may seem extreme, but it’s a reasonable
analogue for the level of functionality you might routinely expect to see in the toughest environments in which your site is accessed: slow 2G connections from old mobile hardware,
people on the other side of highly-restrictive firewalls or overenthusiastic privacy and security software, and of course users of accessibility technologies.
Here’s what broke (and some other observations):
<link rel="alternate">s at the top
I see the thinking that Lynx (and in an even more-extreme fashion, ELinks) have with showing “alternate versions” of a page at the top, but it’s not terribly helpful: most of mine are
designed to help robots, not humans!
Four alternates is pretty common for a WordPress site: post feed, comments feed, and two formats of oEmbed.
I wonder if switching from <link rel="alternate"> elements to Link: HTTP headers would
indicate to Lynx that it shouldn’t be putting these URLs in humans’ faces, while still making them accessible to all the
services that expect to find them? Doing so would require some changes to my caching logic, but might result in a cleaner, more human-readable HTML file as a side-effect. Possibly something worth investigating.
Fortunately, I ensure that my <link rel="alternate">s have a title attribute, which is respected by Lynx and ELinks and makes these scroll-past links
slightly less-confusing.
Not all sites title their alternate links. IKEA.com requires you to scroll through 113 anonymous links for their alternate language versions, because Lynx doesn’t understand the
hreflang attribute.
Post list indentation
Posts on the homepage are structured a little like this:
Strictly-speaking, that’s not valid. Heading elements are only permitted within flow elements. I chose to implement it that way because it seemed to be the most semantically-correct way
to describe the literal “list of posts”. But probably my use of <h2> is not the best solution. Let’s see how Lynx handles it:
Lynx “outdents” headings so they stand out, and “indents” lists so they look like lists. This causes a quirky clash where a heading is inside a list.
It’s not intolerable, but it’s a little ugly.
CSS lightboxes add a step to images
I use a zero-JavaScript approach to image lightboxes: you can see it by clicking
on any of the images in this post! It works by creating a (closed) <dialog> at the bottom of the page, for each image. Each <dialog> has a unique
id, and the inline image links to that anchor.
Originally, I used a CSS :target selector to detect when the link had been clicked and show the
<dialog>. I’ve since changed this to a :has(:target) and directed the link to an element within the dialog, because it works better on browsers
without CSS support.
It’s not perfect: in Lynx navigating on an inline image scrolls down to a list of images at the bottom of the page and selects the current one: hitting the link again now
offers to download the image. I wonder if I might be better to use a JavaScript-powered lightbox after all!
gopher: and finger: links work perfectly!
I was pleased to discover that gopher: and finger: links to alternate copies of a post… worked perfectly! That shouldn’t be a surprise – Lynx natively supports
these protocols.
In a fun quirk and unusually for a standard of its age, the Finger specification did not state the character encoding that ought to
be used. I guess the authors just assumed everybody reading it would use ASCII. But both my
WordPress-to-Finger bridge and Lynx instead assume that UTF-8 is acceptable (being a superset of
ASCII, that seems fair!) which means that emoji work (as shown in the screenshot above). That’s
nuts, isn’t it?
You can’t react to anything
Back in November I added the ability to “react” to a post by clicking an emoji, rather than
typing out a full comment. Because I was feeling lazy, the feature was (and remains) experimental, and I didn’t consider it essential functionality, I implemented it mostly in
JavaScript. Without JavaScript, all you can do is see what others have clicked.
The available emoji vary from post to post; I sometimes like to throw a weird/fun one in there, knowing that it’ll invariably be Ruth that
clicks it first.
In a browser with no JavaScript but with functional CSS, the buttons correctly appear disabled.
But with neither technology available, as in Lynx, they look like they should work, but just… don’t. Oops.
Lynx is correct; this is sloppy code. Without CSS support, it even shows the instruction that implies the buttons will work, but they don’t.
If I decide to keep the reaction buttons long-term, I’ll probably reimplement them so that they function using plain-old HTML
and HTTP, using a <form>, and refactor my JavaScript to properly progressively-enhance the buttons for
those that support it. For now, this’ll do.
Comment form honeypot
The comment form on my blog posts works… but there’s a quirk:
At the end of the comments form, an additional <textarea> appears!
That’s an annoyance. It turns out it’s a honeypot added by Akismet: a fake comments field, normally hidden, that tries to trick spam bots into filling
it (and thus giving themselves away): sort-of a “reverse CAPTCHA” where the
robots do something extra, unintentionally, to prove their inhumanity. Lynx doesn’t understand the code that Akismet uses to hide the form, and so it’s visible to humans, which
is suboptimal both because it’s confusing but also because a human who puts details into it is more-likely to be branded a spambot!
I might look into suppressing Akismet adding its honeypot field in the first place, or else consider one of the alternative anti-spam plugins for WordPress. I’ve heard good things about
Antispam Bee; I ought to try it at some point.
Overall, it’s pretty good
On the whole, DanQ.me works reasonably well in browsers without any JavaScript or CSS capability, with only a few optional
features failing to function fully. There’s always room for improvement, of course, and I’ve got a few things now to add to my “one day” to-do list for my little digital garden.
Obviously, this isn’t really about supporting people using text-mode browsers, who probably represent an incredible minority. It’s about making a real commitment to the
semantic web, to accessibility, and to progressive enhancement! That making your site resilient, performant, and accessible also helps make it function in even the
most-uncommon of browsers is just a bonus.
A mysterious Roman artefact found during an amateur archaeological dig is going on public display in Lincolnshire for the first
time.
The object is one of only 33 dodecahedrons found in Britain, and the first to have been discovered in the Midlands.
…
I learned about these… things… from this BBC News story and I’m just gobsmacked. Seriously: what is this thing?
This isn’t a unique example. 33 have been found in Britain, but these strange Roman artefacts turn up all over Europe: we’ve found hundreds of them.
It doesn’t look like they were something that you’d find in any Roman-era household, but they seem to be common enough that if you wandered around third century Northern Europe with one
for a week or so you’d surely be able to find somebody who could explain them to you. And yet we don’t know why.
Here’s two of them and an equally-mysterious icosahedron found in Germany. Photo courtesy Kleon3, used under a Creative Commons license.
We have absolutely no idea why the Romans made these
things. They’re finely and carefully created from bronze, and we find them buried in coin stashes, which suggests that they were valuable and important. But for what?
Frustrated archaeologists have come up with all kinds of terrible ideas:
Maybe they were a weapon, like the ball of a mace or something to be flung from a sling? Nope; they’re not really heavy enough.
At least one was discovered near a bone staff, so it might have been a decorative scepter? But that doesn’t really go any distance to explaining the unusual shape,
even if true (nor does it rule out the possibility of it being some kind of handled tool).
Perhaps they were a rangefinding tool, where a pair of opposing holes line up only when you’re a particular distance from the tool? If a target of a known size
fills the opposite hole in your vision, its distance must be a specific multiple of your distance to the tool. But that seems unlikely because we’ve never found any markings on these
that would show which side you were using; also the devices aren’t consistently-sized.
Roleplayers might notice the similarity to polyhedral dice: maybe they were a game? But the differing-sized holes make them pretty crap dice (researchers have
tried), and Romans seemed to favour cubic dice anyway. They’re somewhat too intricate and complex to be good candidates for children’s toys.
They could be some kind of magical or divination tool, which would apparently fit with the kinds of fortune-telling mysticism believed to be common to the cultures
at the sites where they’re found. Do the sides and holes correspond to the zodiac or have some other astrological significance?
Perhaps it was entirely decorative? Gold beads of a surprisingly-similar design have
been found as far away as Cambodia, well outside the reach of the Roman Empire, which might suggest a continuing tradition of an earlier precursor dodecahedron!
This author thinks they might have acted as a kind of calendar, used for measuring the height of the
midday sun by observing way its beam is cast through a pair of holes when the tool is placed on a surface and used to determine when winter grains should be planted.
Using replicas, some folks online have demonstrated how they could have been used as a knitting tool for
making the fingers of gloves using a technique called “spool knitting”. But this knitting technique isn’t believed to have been invented until a millennium later than the youngest of
these devices.
Others have proposed that they were a proof of qualification: something a master metalsmith would construct in order to show that they were capable of casting a
complex and intricate object.
Seriously, what the hell are you for?
I love a good archaeological mystery. We might never know why the Romans made these things, but reading clever people’s speculations about them is great.
I continue to be sceptical of AI‘s ability to solve 90%+ of the problems that people are trying to solve with it.
But damn, if you’re feeling uninspired as you’re getting ready to start work on a Monday morning, try dumping your to-do list into a songwriting AI like Suno and ask it to write an uplifting song about how you’ll get it finished. It’s like having your very own
cheerleader.
❎ Good ❎ Cheap ☑️ Fast. I guess generative AI is a “choose one” situation, and the one you have to choose is “fast”. But still:
it certainly got me pumped-up and ready to work.
Prompt:uplifting electronic pop about Dan completing his to-do list today: filing his meetup expenses; performance-testing his CircleCI workflow; leading a team
meeting; learning about Full Site Editing
Lyrics:
Filing expenses
Gotta get ’em done
No time to waste
Gotta have some fun
Dan’s on a mission
Gotta stay on track
He’s gonna conquer
Ain’t nothing gonna hold him back
Performance testing
Gonna make it fly
CircleCI workflow
Gonna reach the sky
Dan’s got the focus
He’s in the zone
Gonna make it happen
Gonna make it his own
Leading that team meeting
Gonna show his might
Guiding them forward
Shining so bright
Dan’s a leader
He’s got it all
Inspiring the team
Gonna make ’em stand tall
I think I might be more-prone to nerd sniping when I’m travelling.
Last week, a coworker pointed out an unusually-large chimney on the back of a bus depot and I lost sleep poring over 50s photos of Dutch building sites to try to work out if it was
original.
When a boat tour guide told me that the Netherlands used to have a window tax, I fell down a rabbit hole of how it influenced local architecture and why the influence was different in the UK.
Why does travelling make me more-prone to nerd sniping? Maybe I should see if there’s any likely psychological effect that might cause that…
From 1696 until 1851 a “window tax” was imposed in England and Wales1.
Sort-of a precursor to property taxes like council tax today, it used an estimate of the value of a property as an indicator of the wealth of its occupants: counting the number of
windows provided the mechanism for assessment.
The hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is thinking in “old money”2.
Window tax replaced an earlier hearth tax, following the ascension to the English throne of Mary II and William III of Orange. Hearth tax had come from a similar philosophy: that
you can approximate the wealth of a household by some aspect of their home, in this case the number of stoves and fireplaces they had.
(A particular problem with window tax as enacted is that its “stepping”, which was designed to weigh particularly heavily on the rich with their large houses, was that it similarly
weighed heavily on large multi-tenant buildings, whose landlord would pass on those disproportionate costs to their tenants!)
It’d be temping to blame William and Mary for the window tax, but the reality is more-complex and reflects late renaissance British attitudes to the limits of state authority.
Why a window tax? There’s two ways to answer that:
A window tax – and a hearth tax, for that matter – can be assessed without the necessity of the taxpayer to disclose their income. Income tax, nowadays the most-significant form of
taxation in the UK, was long considered to be too much of an invasion upon personal privacy3.
But compared to a hearth tax, it can be validated from outside the property. Counting people in a property in an era before solid recordkeeping is hard. Counting hearths is
easier… so long as you can get inside the property. Counting windows is easier still and can be done completely from the outside!
If you’re in Britain, finding older buildings with windows bricked-up to save on tax is pretty easy. I took a break from writing this post, walked for three minutes, and found
one.4
There were a few work-related/adjacent activities. But also a table football tournament, among other bits of fun.
One of the things I learned while on this trip was that the Netherlands, too, had a window tax for a time. But there’s an interesting difference.
The Dutch window tax was introduced during the French occupation, under Napoleon, in 1810 – already much later than its equivalent in England – and continued even after he was ousted
and well into the late 19th century. And that leads to a really interesting social side-effect.
My brief interest in 19th century Dutch tax policy was piqued during my team’s boat tour.
Glass manufacturing technique evolved rapidly during the 19th century. At the start of the century, when England’s window tax law was in full swing, glass panes were typically made
using the crown glass process: a bauble of glass would be
spun until centrifugal force stretched it out into a wide disk, getting thinner towards its edge.
The very edge pieces of crown glass were cut into triangles for use in leaded glass, with any useless offcuts recycled; the next-innermost pieces were the thinnest and clearest, and
fetched the highest price for use as windows. By the time you reached the centre you had a thick, often-swirly piece of glass that couldn’t be sold for a high price: you still sometimes
find this kind among the leaded glass in particularly old pub windows5.
They’re getting rarer, but I’ve lived in houses with small original panes of crown glass like these!
As the 19th century wore on, cylinder glass became the norm. This is produced by making an iron cylinder as a mould, blowing glass into it, and then carefully un-rolling the cylinder
while the glass is still viscous to form a reasonably-even and flat sheet. Compared to spun glass, this approach makes it possible to make larger window panes. Also: it scales
more-easily to industrialisation, reducing the cost of glass.
The Dutch window tax survived into the era of large plate glass, and this lead to an interesting phenomenon: rather than have lots of windows, which would be expensive,
late-19th century buildings were constructed with windows that were as large as possible to maximise the ratio of the amount of light they let in to the amount of tax for which
they were liable6.
Look at the size of those windows! If you’re limited in how many you can have, but you’ve got the technology, you’re going to make them as large as you possibly can!
That’s an architectural trend you can still see in Amsterdam (and elsewhere in Holland) today. Even where buildings are renovated or newly-constructed, they tend – or are required by
preservation orders – to mirror the buildings they neighbour, which influences architectural decisions.
Notice how each building has only between one and three windows on the ground floor, letting as much light in while minimising the tax burden.
It’s really interesting to see the different architectural choices produced in two different cities as a side-effect of fundamentally the same economic choice, resulting from slightly
different starting conditions in each (a half-century gap and a land shortage in one). While Britain got fewer windows, the Netherlands got bigger windows, and you can still see the
effects today.
…and social status
But there’s another interesting this about this relatively-recent window tax, and that’s about how people broadcast their social status.
This Google Street Canal (?) View photo shows a house on Keizersgracht, one of the richest parts of Amsterdam. Note the superfluous decorative window above the front door
and the basement-level windows for the servants’ quarters.
In some of the traditionally-wealthiest parts of Amsterdam, you’ll find houses with more windows than you’d expect. In the photo above, notice:
How the window density of the central white building is about twice that of the similar-width building on the left,
That a mostly-decorative window has been installed above the front door, adorned with a decorative
leaded glass pattern, and
At the bottom of the building, below the front door (up the stairs), that a full set of windows has been provided even for the below-ground servants quarters!
When it was first constructed, this building may have been considered especially ostentatious. Its original owners deliberately requested that it be built in a way that would attract a
higher tax bill than would generally have been considered necessary in the city, at the time. The house stood out as a status symbol, like shiny jewellery, fashionable clothes,
or a classy car might today.
I originally wanted to insert a picture here that represented how one might show status through fashion today. But then I remembered I don’t know anything about fashion7. But somehow my stock image search suggested this photo, and I
love it so much I’m using it anyway. You’re welcome.
How did we go wrong? A century and a bit ago the super-wealthy used to demonstrate their status by showing off how much tax they can pay. Nowadays, they generally seem
more-preoccupied with getting away with paying as little as possible, or none8.
Can we bring back 19th-century Dutch social status telegraphing, please?9
Footnotes
1 Following the Treaty of Union the window tax was also applied in Scotland, but
Scotland’s a whole other legal beast that I’m going to quietly ignore for now because it doesn’t really have any bearing on this story.
2 The second-hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is
finding a reliable source for the rates. I used an archived copy of a guru site about Wolverhampton history.
3 Even relatively-recently, the argument that income tax might be repealed as incompatible
with British values shows up in political debate. Towards the end of the 19th century, Prime Ministers Disraeli and Gladstone could be relied upon to agree with one another on almost
nothing, but both men spoke at length about their desire to abolish income tax, even setting out plans to phase it out… before having to cancel those plans when some
financial emergency showed up. Turns out it’s hard to get rid of.
4 There are, of course, other potential reasons for bricked-up windows – even aesthetic ones – but a bit of a giveaway is if the bricking-up
reduces the number of original windows to 6, 9, 14 or 19, which are thesholds at which the savings gained by bricking-up are the greatest.
5 You’ve probably heard about how glass remains partially-liquid forever and how this
explains why old windows are often thicker at the bottom. You’ve probably also already had it explained to you that this is complete bullshit. I only
mention it here to preempt any discussion in the comments.
6 This is even more-pronounced in cities like Amsterdam where a width/frontage tax forced
buildings to be as tall and narrow and as close to their neighbours as possible, further limiting opportunities for access to natural light.
7 Yet I’m willing to learn a surprising amount about Dutch tax law of the 19th century. Go
figure.
I’ve got a (now four-year-old) Unraid NAS called Fox and I’m a huge fan. I particularly love the fact that Unraid can work not only as a NAS, but also as a fully-fledged Docker appliance, enabling me to easily install and maintain all manner of applications.
There isn’t really a generator attached to Fox, just a UPS battery backup. The sign was liberated from our shonky home electrical system.
I was chatting this week to a colleague who was considering getting a similar setup, and he seemed to be taking notes of things he might like to install, once he’s got one. So I figured
I’d round up five of my favourite things to install on an Unraid NAS that:
Don’t require any third-party accounts (low dependencies),
Don’t need any kind of high-powered hardware (low specs), and
Provide value with very little set up (low learning curve).
It’d have been cooler if I’d have secretly written this blog post while sitting alongside said colleague (shh!). But sadly it had to wait until I was home.
Syncthing’s just an awesome piece of set-and-forget software that facilitates file synchronisation between all of your devices and can also form part of a backup strategy.
Here’s the skinny: you install Syncthing on several devices, then give each the identification key of another to pair them. Now you can add folders on each and “share” them with the
others, and the two are kept in-sync. There’s lots of options for power users, but just as a starting point you can use this to:
Manage the photos on your phone and push copies to your desktop whenever you’re home (like your favourite cloud photo sync service, but selfhosted).
Keep your Obsidian notes in-sync between all your devices (normally costs $4/month).1
Get a copy of the documents from all your devices onto your NAS, for backup purposes (note that sync’ing alone, even with
versioning enabled, is not a good backup: the idea is that you run an actual backup from your NAS!).
You know IFTTT? Zapier? Services that help you to “automate” things based on inputs and outputs. Huginn’s like that, but selfhosted.
Also: more-powerful.
When we first started looking for a dog to adopt (y’know, before we got this derper), I set up Huginn watchers to monitor the websites of several rescue centres, filter them by some of our criteria, and push
the results to us in real-time on Slack, giving us an edge over other prospective puppy-parents.
The learning curve is steeper than anything else on this list, and I almost didn’t include it for that reason alone. But once you’ve learned your way around its idiosyncrasies and
dipped your toe into the more-advanced Javascript-powered magic it can do, you really begin to unlock its potential.
It couples well with Home Assistant, if that’s your jam. But even without it, you can find yourself automating things you never expected to.
Many of these suggested apps benefit well from you exposing them to the open Web rather than just running them on your LAN,
and an RSS reader is probably the best example (you want to read your news feeds when you’re out and about, right?). What you
need for that is a reverse proxy, and there are lots of guides to doing it super-easily, even if you’re not on a static IP
address.2.
Alternatively you can just VPN in to your home: your router might be able to arrange this, or else Unraid can do it for you!
You know how sometimes you need to give somebody your email address but you don’t actually want to. Like: sure, I’d like you to email me a verification code for this download, but I
don’t trust you not to spam me later! What you need is a disposable email address.3
How do you feel about having infinite email addresses that you can make up on-demand (without even having access to a computer), subscribe to by RSS, and never have to see unless you specifically want to.
You just need to install Open Trashmail, point the MX records of a few domain names or subdomains (you’ve got some spare domain names
lying around, right? if not; they’re pretty cheap…) at it, and it will now accept email to any address on those domains. You can make up addresses off the top of your head,
even away from an Internet connection when using a paper-based form, and they work. You can check them later if you want to… or ignore them forever.
Couple it with an RSS reader, or Huginn, or Slack, and you can get a notification or take some action when an email arrives!
Need to give that escape room your email address to get a copy of your “team photo”? Give them a throwaway, pick up the picture when you get home, and then forget you ever gave it
to them.
Company give you a freebie on your birthday if you sign up their mailing list? Sign up 366 times with them and write a Huginn workflow that puts “today’s” promo code into your
Obsidian notetaking app (Sync’d over Syncthing) but filters out everything else.
Suspect some organisation is selling your email address on to third parties? Give them a unique email address that you only give to them and catch them in a honeypot.
It isn’t pretty, but… it doesn’t need to be! Nobody actually sees the admin interface except you anyway.
Plus, it’s just kinda cool to be able to brand your shortlinks with your own name, right? If you follow only one link from this post, let it be to watch this video
that helps explain why this is important: danq.link/url-shortener-highlights.
I run many, many other Docker containers and virtual machines on my NAS. These five aren’t even the “top five” that I
use… they’re just five that are great starters because they’re easy and pack a lot of joy into their learning curve.
And if your NAS can’t do all the above… consider Unraid for your next NAS!
Footnotes
1 I wrote the beginnings of this post on my phone while in the Channel Tunnel and then
carried on using my desktop computer once I was home. Sync is magic.
2 I can’t share or recommend one reverse proxy guide in particular because I set my own up
because I can configure Nginx in my sleep, but I did a quick search and found several that all look good so I imagine you can do the same. You don’t have to do it on day one, though!
An easy find. Didn’t take nor leave any books, but briefly skimmed the Borland JBuilder 2 Getting Started guide, because it was familiar/nostalgic. Pretty sure I used this tool… about
25 years ago!
An easy find. As a approached I thought that a couple cuddling here might be in my way, but they were just getting ready to leave as I arrived! SL (love
the long thin logbook!), TFTC. Now to make my way back to the station!
Eww. Had to put my hand into two gross holes before finding the (correct) third gross hole I needed to put my hand into. Worth it in the end for a happy smiley face. Thanks for bringing
me to this place and teaching me its history. TFTC!
TFTC! I’m not carrying any tickets for UK transport, but I’ve got a (mildly
defaced) British banknote and I found a tram (the number 13, which connected me to my hotel this week) and a ferry (which I then went and caught to go find some more caches!).
Cash? Not carrying much of that. But my credit card sits at the front of my minimalist wallet and, as a bonus, shows my geocaching username (which is the same as my actual name) without
showing the actual card number. TFTC!
No luck here despite an extended search, the hint, and the spoiler image. Confident I’ve found the right host but no sign in the cache. I wonder if another geocacher is holding it right
now, sitting somewhere nearby to sign the log? Or else it’s probably gone missing. 😢
notes
reposts
checkins
videos
articles
