Zap

This week, I received a ~240V AC electric shock. I can’t recommend it.

A 10-year-old girl hangs from a scaffolding pole outside a white house.
As you may have guessed based on photos in previous posts, our house is currently wrapped in a convenient climbing frame scaffolding.

We’re currently having our attic converted, so we’ve had some electricians in doing the necessary electrical wiring. Shortly after they first arrived they discovered that our existing electrics were pretty catastrophic, and needed to make a few changes including a new fusebox and disconnecting the hilariously-unsafe distribution board in the garage.

Lifted floor showing central heating pipes and a tangle of electrical cables.
The owner before last of our house worked for SSEN and did all of his own wiring, and left us a rats’ nest of spaghetti wiring that our electricians described as being unlike anything they’d ever seen before. Also a literal rats’ nest under the decking, but we got rid of that already.

After connecting everything new up they began switching everything back on and testing the circuits… and we were surprised to hear arcing sounds and see all the lights flickering.

The electricians switched everything off and started switching breakers back on one at a time to try to identify the source of the fault, reasonably assuming that something was shorting somewhere, but no matter what combination of switches were enabled there always seemed to be some kind of problem.

Electricity shining a torch into a cupboard containing an fusebox with an open cover; the switches are in a mixture of on and off positions.
You know those escape room puzzles where you have to get the right permutation of switch combinations? This was a lot less fun than that.

Noticing that the oven’s clock wasn’t just blinking 00:00 (as it would after a power cut) but repeatedly resetting itself to 00:00, I pointed this out to the electricians as an indicator that the problem was occurring on their current permutation of switches, which was strange because it was completely different to the permutation that had originally exhibited flickering lights.

I reached over to point at the oven, and the tip of my finger touched the metal of its case…

Blam! I felt a jolt through my hand and up my arm and uncontrollably leapt backwards across the room, convulsing as I fell to the floor. I gestured to the cooker and shouted something about it being live, and the electricians switched off its circuit and came running with those clever EM-field sensor pens they use.

Somehow the case of the cooker was energised despite being isolated at the fusebox? How could that be?

Dan, bare-chested, lies in a hospital bed with an ECG hooked-up to him.
Buy one ECG appointment. Get a free partial chest-shaving free!

I missed the next bits of the diagnosis of our electrical system because I was busy getting my own diagnosis: it turns out that if you get a mains electric shock – even if you’re conscious and mobile – the NHS really want you to go to A&E.

At my suggestion, Ruth delivered me to the Minor Injuries unit at our nearest hospital (I figured that what I had wasn’t that serious, and the local hospital generally has shorter wait times!)… who took one look at me and told me that I ought to be at the emergency department of the bigger hospital over the way.

ECG printout showing a report of "Abnormal ECG: sinus arrhythmia".
The first hospital were kind enough to hook me up to an ECG before sending me on to the A&E department. It indicated possible cardiac arrhythmia in the sinus node – basically: my heart’s natural pacemaker was firing somewhat irregularly – which is kinda what you’d expect from an AC zap.

Off at the “right” hospital I got another round of ECG tests, some blood tests (which can apparently be used to diagnose muscular damage: who knew?), and all the regular observations of pulse and blood pressure and whatnot that you might expect.

And then, because let’s face it I was probably in better condition than most folks being dropped off at A&E, I was left to chill in a short stay ward while the doctors waited for test results to come through.

Two electricians, one in a hard hat, look in an outdoor metering cupboard by torchlight.
Apparently our electricity meter blew itself up somewhere along the way, leaving us with even less of a chance to turn the power back on again.

Meanwhile, back at home our electricians had called-in SSEN, who look after the grid in our area. It turns out that the problem wasn’t directly related to our electrical work at all but had occurred one or two pylons “upstream” from our house. A fault on the network had, from the sounds of things, resulted in “live” being sent down not only the live wire but up the earth wire too.

That’s why appliances in the house were energised even with their circuit breakers switched-off: they were connected to an earth that was doing pretty-much the opposite of what an earth should: discharging into the house!

Linesmen examining an electricity pylon by torchlight.
For the next day or so, a parade of linesmen climbed up and down all the pylons in the field behind our house, hunting for the source of the problem.

It seems an inconceivable coincidence to me that a network fault might happen to occur during the downtime during which we happened to have electricians working, so I find myself wondering if perhaps the network fault had occurred some time ago but only become apparent/dangerous as a result of changes to our household configuration.

I’m no expert, but I sketched a diagram showing how such a thing might happen (click to embiggen). I’ll stress that I don’t know for certain what went wrong: I’m just basing this on what I’ve been told my SSEN plus a little speculation:

MS Paint grade illustration showing how a faulty transformer on a power pole, crossing live with earth, might go unnoticed as a result of the earth spike behind our garage until the garage's (unsafe) circuit is disconnected.

By the time I was home from the hospital the following day, our driveway was overflowing with the vehicles of grid engineers to the point of partially blocking the main street outside (which at least helped ensure that people obeyed our new 20mph limit for a change).

A driveway full of vehicles spills out onto the nearby road.
We weren’t even able to get our own car onto our driveway when we got back from the hospital.

Two and a half days later, I’m back at work and mostly recovered. I’ve still got some discomfort in my left hand, especially if I try to grip anything tightly, but I’m definitely moving in the right direction.

It’s actually more-annoying how much my chest itches from having various patches of hair shaved-off to make it possible to hook up ECG electrodes!

A linesman hangs from his climbing belt at the top of a pole, while two others look on from the ground.
The actual conversation at this point seemed to consist of the guy at the top of the pole confirming that yes, he really had disconnected the live wire from our house, and one at the bottom saying he can’t have because he’s still seeing electricity flowing. Makes sense now, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the short of it is that I recommend against getting zapped by the grid. If it had given me superpowers it might have been a different story, but I guess it just gave me sore muscles and a house with a dozen non-working sockets.

A 10-year-old girl hangs from a scaffolding pole outside a white house.× Lifted floor showing central heating pipes and a tangle of electrical cables.× Electricity shining a torch into a cupboard containing an fusebox with an open cover; the switches are in a mixture of on and off positions.× Dan, bare-chested, lies in a hospital bed with an ECG hooked-up to him.× ECG printout showing a report of "Abnormal ECG: sinus arrhythmia".× Two electricians, one in a hard hat, look in an outdoor metering cupboard by torchlight.× Linesmen examining an electricity pylon by torchlight.× A driveway full of vehicles spills out onto the nearby road.× A linesman hangs from his climbing belt at the top of a pole, while two others look on from the ground.× MS Paint grade illustration showing how a faulty transformer on a power pole, crossing live with earth, might go unnoticed as a result of the earth spike behind our garage until the garage's (unsafe) circuit is disconnected.×

Yours Quim-cerely

A lovely letter from the Vagina Museum – which I’ve not had the opportunity to visit yet – came through my letterbox:

Printed letter on Vagina Museum headed paper, reading: Dear Dan Q, I'm assuming you donated £50 on 1st February in response to my desperate plea for help on Mastodon. I'm pleased to say this was printed on our brand spanking new Brother Laser. The entire Vagina Museum thanks you for your generosity in our hour of need. Yours quim-cerely, Zoe Williams; Head of Communications and Fundraising
“Yours quim-cerely,” doesn’t appear in any style guide but is now the best sign-off in any letter I’ve ever received.

This moment of joy was kick-started when I casually dropped in on a conversation about printer recommendations. I’ve got a big ol’ Brother printer here, and it’s great, not least because even though it’s got a tonne of features like duplexing and (double-sided) scanning and photocopying and it’s even got a fax machine built in for some reason… it doesn’t try to be any more “smart” than it needs to be. It doesn’t talk to Alexa or order itself more toner (it even gets-by with knockoff toner!) or try to do anything well… except print things, which it does wonderfully.

For this and other reasons I recommended they buy a Brother.

Then, alongside some other Fediversians, I chipped in to help them buy one.

Totally worth it for the letter alone. Now I just need to find an excuse to visit an exhibition!

Printed letter on Vagina Museum headed paper, reading: Dear Dan Q, I'm assuming you donated £50 on 1st February in response to my desperate plea for help on Mastodon. I'm pleased to say this was printed on our brand spanking new Brother Laser. The entire Vagina Museum thanks you for your generosity in our hour of need. Yours quim-cerely, Zoe Williams; Head of Communications and Fundraising×

BBC News… without the crap

Did I mention recently that I love RSS? That it brings me great joy? That I start and finish almost every day in my feed reader? Probably.

I used to have a single minor niggle with the BBC News RSS feed: that it included sports news, which I didn’t care about. So I wrote a script that downloaded it, stripped sports news, and re-exported the feed for me to subscribe to. Magic.

RSS reader showing duplicate copies of the news story "Barbie 2? 'We'd love to,' says Warner Bros boss", and an entry from BBC Sounds.
Lately my BBC News feed has caused me some annoyance and frustration.

But lately – presumably as a result of technical changes at the Beeb’s side – this feed has found two fresh ways to annoy me:

  1. The feed now re-publishes a story if it gets re-promoted to the front pagebut with a different <guid> (it appears to get a #0 after it when first published, a #1 the second time, and so on). In a typical day the feed reader might scoop up new stories about once an hour, any by the time I get to reading them the same exact story might appear in my reader multiple times. Ugh.
  2. They’ve started adding iPlayer and BBC Sounds content to the BBC News feed. I don’t follow BBC News in my feed reader because I want to watch or listen to things. If you do, that’s fine, but I don’t, and I’d rather filter this content out.

Luckily, I already have a recipe for improving this feed, thanks to my prior work. Let’s look at my newly-revised script (also available on GitHub):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'bundler/inline'

# # Sample crontab:
# # At 41 minutes past each hour, run the script and log the results
# */20 * * * * ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.rb > ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.log 2>>&1

# Dependencies:
# * open-uri - load remote URL content easily
# * nokogiri - parse/filter XML
gemfile do
  source 'https://rubygems.org'
  gem 'nokogiri'
end
require 'open-uri'

# Regular expression describing the GUIDs to reject from the resulting RSS feed
# We want to drop everything from the "sport" section of the website, also any iPlayer/Sounds links
REJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING = /^https:\/\/www\.bbc\.co\.uk\/(sport|iplayer|sounds)\//

# Load and filter the original RSS
rss = Nokogiri::XML(open('https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=uk'))
rss.css('item').select{|item| item.css('guid').text =~ REJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING }.each(&:unlink)

# Strip the anchors off the <guid>s: BBC News "republishes" stories by using guids with #0, #1, #2 etc, which results in duplicates in feed readers
rss.css('guid').each{|g|g.content=g.content.gsub(/#.*$/,'')}

File.open( '/www/bbc-news-no-sport.xml', 'w' ){ |f| f.puts(rss.to_s) }
It’s amazing what you can do with Nokogiri and a half dozen lines of Ruby.

That revised script removes from the feed anything whose <guid> suggests it’s sports news or from BBC Sounds or iPlayer, and also strips any “anchor” part of the <guid> before re-exporting the feed. Much better. (Strictly speaking, this can result in a technically-invalid feed by introducing duplicates, but your feed reader oughta be smart enough to compensate for and ignore that: mine certainly is!)

You’re free to take and adapt the script to your own needs, or – if you don’t mind being tied to my opinions about what should be in BBC News’ RSS feed – just subscribe to my copy at: https://fox.q-t-a.uk/bbc-news-no-sport.xml

RSS reader showing duplicate copies of the news story "Barbie 2? 'We'd love to,' says Warner Bros boss", and an entry from BBC Sounds.×

RSS > ActivityPub

RSS is better than ActivityPub1.

Photograph of a boxing match, but with the heads of the competitors replaced with the ActivityPub and RSS logos (and "AP" or "RSS" written on their clothes, respectively). RSS is delivering a powerful uppercut to ActivityPub.
A devastating blow by RSS against a competitor 19 years his junior! For updates on this bout as it develops, don’t forget to subscribe… using either protocol.

When I subscribe to content, I want:

  • Resilient failsafes. ActivityPub has many points-of-failure. A notification might fail to complete transmission as a result of downtime, faults, or network conditions, and the receiving server might never know. A feed reader, conversely, can tell you that an address 404’d or the server was down.
  • Retroactive access. Once you fix the problem above… you still don’t get the message you missed: it’s probably gone forever – there’s no retroactive access. The same is true when your ActivityPub server connects with a peer for the first time: you only ever get new content after that point. RSS, on the other hand, provides some number of “recent” items the moment you first subscribe.
  • Simple subscriptions. RSS can be served from a statically-hosted single file, which makes it suitable to deploy anywhere as well as consume using anything. It can be read, after a fashion, in anything from Lynx upwards.

RSS ticks all these boxes. If I can choose between RSS and ActivityPub to subscribe to your content, and I don’t need a real-time update, I’m probably going to choose RSS.

Footnotes

1 I feel like this statement needs a few clarifications and caveats, but my hot take looks spicier if I bury them in a footnote!

  • By RSS, I mean whichever pull-based basic HTTP you like, be that Atom, JSON Feed, h-entry, or even just properly-marked-up HTML5: did you know that the <article> element is intended to be suitable for syndication use?
  • Obviously I appreciate that RSS and ActivityPub are different tools for different jobs, and there are doubtless use-cases for which ActivityPub is clearly the superior solution.
  • I certainly don’t object to services providing both RSS and ActivityPub as syndication options, like Mastodon does, where both might be good choices.
Photograph of a boxing match, but with the heads of the competitors replaced with the ActivityPub and RSS logos (and "AP" or "RSS" written on their clothes, respectively). RSS is delivering a powerful uppercut to ActivityPub.×

Out as Poly at Work

During one of the periods today that Facebook wasn’t down, a friend who makes use of the platform shared a Facebook post with me, which read:

Has anyone informed work/colleagues about being ENM and how was it received?

I’ve informed a few colleagues but I am considering informing my team as part of my Team Champion and EDI role.

I’ve been “out” at every one of the employers1 since I entered into my first open/nonmonogamous relationship a couple of decades ago.

I didn’t do so immediately: in fact, I waited almost until the point that coming out was an academic necessity! The point at which it was only a matter of time before somebody thought they’d caught us “cheating”… or else because I didn’t want to have to lie to coworkers about e.g. from whom a romantic gift might have come.

Laptop and mug alongside a notebook and pencil. In the notebook is written "TODO: 1. Come out to colleagues. 2. ???. 3. Profit."
I guess I’ll squeeze in “come out to colleagues” in between the project planning meeting and working on rolling out the server upgrades.

Here’s how it went to be “out” at each of the three full-time jobs I’ve held over that period:

SmartData

We lived and worked in and around a small town, and in our small tight-knit team we all had a reasonable handle on what was going on in one another’s personal lives. By the time I was actively in a relationship with Ruth (while still in a relationship with Claire, whom all my coworkers had met at e.g. office parties and the like), it just seemed prudent to mention it, as well as being honest and transparent.

Dan with coworkers and friends drinking in a pub.
This photograph – featuring some of my coworkers – was taken in 2005. At that point, they probably all thought of me as a regular, normal person. At least, as far as my relationship structure was concerned. Not in any other way. Obviously.

It went fine. And it made Monday watercooler conversations about “who what I did at the weekend” simpler. Being a small team sharing a single open-plan office meant that I was able to mention my relationship status to literally the entire company at once, and everybody took it with a shrug of noncommittal acceptance.

The Bodleian Libraries

The Bodleian Libraries was a much bigger beast, and in turn a part of the massive University of Oxford. It was big enough to have a “LGBT+ Staff” network within its Equality and Diversity unit, within which – because of cultural intersections2 – I was able to meet a handful of other poly folk at the University.

Dan poses with Bodleian coworkers in front of a party feast in a low-ceilinged office.
This motley crew were exactly as warm and accepting a bunch as you could ask for.

I mentioned very early on – as soon as it came up organically – the structure of the relationship I was in, and everybody was cool (or failing that, at least professional) about it. Curious coworkers asked carefully-crafted questions, and before long (and following my lead) my curious lifestyle choices were as valid a topic for light-hearted jokes as anything else in that fun and gossipy office.

And again: it paid-off pragmatically, especially when I took parental leave after the birth of each of our two kids3.

It also helped defuse a situation when I was spotted by a more-distant coworker on my way back from a lunchtime date with a lover who wasn’t Ruth, and my confused colleague introduced herself to the woman that she assumed must’ve been the partner she’d heard about. When I explained that no, this is a different person I’m seeing my colleague seemed taken aback, and I was glad to be able to call on a passing coworker who knew me better to back me up in my assertion that no, this wasn’t just me trying to lie to cover some illicit work affair! Work allies are useful.

Automattic

I’ve been with Automattic for four and a half years now, and this time around I went one step further in telling potential teammates about my relationship structure by mentioning it in my “Howdymattic” video – a video introduction new starters are encouraged to record to say hi to the rest of the company4.

Framegrab from Dan's Howdymattic video showing him making a "V" shape with his fingers alongside a diagram of his V-shaped relationship.
Some full-on MSPaint grade titling made it into that video, didn’t it?

A convenient side-effect of this early coming-out was that I found myself immediately inducted into the “polymatticians” group – a minor diversity group within Automattic, comprising a massive 1.2% of the company, who openly identify as engaging in nonmonogamous relationships5!

That was eye-opening. Not only does Automattic have a stack of the regular inclusivity groups you might expect from a big tech company (queer, Black, women, trans, neurodiverse) and a handful of the less-common ones (over-40s, cancer survivors, nondrinkers, veterans), they’ve also got a private group for those of us who happen to be both Automatticians and in (or inclined towards) polyamorous relationships. Mind blown.

My relationship structure’s been… quietly and professionally accepted. It doesn’t really come up (why would it? in a distributed company it has even less-impact on anything than it did in my previous non-distributed roles)… outside of the “polymatticians” private space.

In summary: I can recommend being “out” at work. So long as you’d feel professionally safe to do so: relationship structure isn’t necessarily a protected characteristic (it’s complicated), and even if it were you might be careful about mentioning it in some environments. It’s great to have the transparency to not have to watch your words when a coworker asks about “your partner”. Plus being free to be emotionally honest at work is just good for your mental wellbeing, in my opinion! If you trust your coworkers, be honest with them. If you don’t… perhaps you need to start looking for a better job?

Footnotes

1 I’m not counting my freelance work during any of those periods, although I’ve been pretty transparent with them too.

2 Let’s be clear: most queer folks, just like most straight folks, seem to be similarly-inclined towards monogamy. But ethnical non-monogamy in various forms seems to represent a larger minority within queer communities than outside them. There’s all kinds of possible reasons for this, and smarter people than me have written about them, but personally I’m of the opinion that, for many, it stems from the fact that by the time you’re societally-forced to critically examine your relationships, you might as well go the extra mile and decide whether your relationship structure is right for you too. In other words: I suspect that cis hetro folks would probably have a proportional parity of polyamory if they weren’t saturated with media and cultural role models that show them what their relationship “should” look like.

3 Unwilling to lie, I made absolutely clear that I was neither the father of either of them nor the husband of their mother (among other reasons, the law prohibits Ruth from marrying me on account of being married to JTA), but pointed out that my contract merely stipulated that I was the partner of a birth parent, which was something I’d made completely clear since I first started working there. I’m not sure if I was just rubber-stamped through the University’s leave process as a matter of course or if they took a deeper look at me and figured “yeah, we’re not going to risk picking a legal fight with that guy”, but I got my leave granted.

4 If you enjoyed my “Howdymattic”, you’ll probably also love the outtakes.

5 There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Laptop and mug alongside a notebook and pencil. In the notebook is written "TODO: 1. Come out to colleagues. 2. ???. 3. Profit."× Dan with coworkers and friends drinking in a pub.× Dan poses with Bodleian coworkers in front of a party feast in a low-ceilinged office.× Framegrab from Dan's Howdymattic video showing him making a "V" shape with his fingers alongside a diagram of his V-shaped relationship.×

Sonarr > Huginn > Slack

I use a tool called Sonarr to, uhh1, keep track of when new episodes of television shows are released, regardless of what platform they’re on (Netflix, Prime, iPlayer, whatever) and notify me so I remember to watch it.

For several years, I’ve used IFTTT as the intermediary, receiving webhooks from Sonarr and translating them for Slack:

A series of webhooks sent from Sonarr to IFTTT to Slack.
This worked for years, but it’s time to retire it.

IFTTT‘s move to kill its Legacy Pro plan2 – which I was on – gave me reason to re-assess this configuration. It turns that the only Pro feature I was using was an IFTTT “filter” to convert the Sonarr webhooks to a Slack-friendly-format.

Given that I’m running an installation of Huginn on my home network anyway, I resolved to re-implement this flow in Huginn and cancel my IFTTT subscription.

A series of webhooks sent from Sonarr to Huginn to Slack.
Raven-powered automation is the new hotness.

This turned out to be so easy I wonder why I never did it before.

First, I created a Webhook Agent and gave the URL to Sonarr.

Then I connected that to a Slack Agent with the following configuration:

{
  "webhook_url": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/...",
  "channel": "#sonarr",
  "username": "Sonarr",
  "message": "*<https://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id={{series.tvdbId}}|{{series.title}}>*\nNew episodes:{% for episode in episodes %}\n• S{{episode.seasonNumber}}E{{episode.episodeNumber}} {{episode.title}}{% endfor %}",
  "icon": ":tv:"
}
I’ve omitted my Slack webhook URL so you don’t spam me. I tried for far too long to get the pluralize filter to work so it’d say “episode” or “episodes” as appropriate before realising I didn’t care enough and gave up.

Then all I needed to do was re-emit some of the previous webhooks to test it:

Slack chat window showing notifications: (1) a new episode of Resident Alien, announced by IFTTT, (b) the same episode, announced by "Sonarr", (c) two episodes of Marvel's Spidey and His Amazing Friends, also announced by "Sonarr".
As a bonus, I swapped out the IFTTT logo for Slackmoji’s :tv: icon and added the “Sonarr” username, as shown in my code sample.

Now I’ll continue to know when there’s new television to watch3!

I love the power and flexibility that Huginn provides to help automate your life. It does many of the things that I used to do with a handful of cron jobs and shell scripts, but all in one convenient place.

Footnotes

1 I’ve heard there are other uses for the tool. Your mileage may vary. Don’t forget to pay for your content, if possible.

2 Like many others, I originally signed up to the plan under the promise that the price would be honoured forever. Turns out “forever” means “three years”: who knew?

3 It’s especially useful when you’re between seasons or a show is on hiatus to be reminded that it’s back and I should go and watch it. Hey, there’s a thought: I wonder if I can extract the subtitles from shows and run them through a summarising LLM to give me a couple of paragraphs reminding me “what happened last series” if the show’s been on a long break?

A series of webhooks sent from Sonarr to IFTTT to Slack.× A series of webhooks sent from Sonarr to Huginn to Slack.× Slack chat window showing notifications: (1) a new episode of Resident Alien, announced by IFTTT, (b) the same episode, announced by "Sonarr", (c) two episodes of Marvel's Spidey and His Amazing Friends, also announced by "Sonarr".×

Freedom of the Mountain

During a family holiday last week to the Three Valleys region of the French Alps for some skiing1, I came to see that I enjoy a privilege I call the freedom of the mountain.

In black skiwear, Dan looks into the camera from a bench in the snow, his skis upright behind him.
“Mornin’. Let’s go skiing.”

The Freedom

The freedom of the mountain is a privilege that comes from having the level of experience necessary to take on virtually any run a resort has to offer. It provides a handful of benefits denied to less-confident skiers:

  • I usually don’t feed to look at a map to plan my next route; whichever way I go will be fine!
  • When I reach one or more lifts, I can choose which to take based on the length of their queue, rather than considering their destinations.
  • When faced with a choice of pistes (or an off-piste route), my choice can be based on my mood, how crowded they are, etc., rather than their rated difficulty.
A snow-covered Alpine glacier sandwiched into a gully of exposed rocks.
Let’s tear this up, yo.

The downside is that I’m less well-equipped to consider the needs of others! Out skiing with Ruth one morning I suggested a route back into town that “felt easy” based on my previous runs, only to have her tell me that – according to the map – it probably wasn’t!

Approaching the Peak

The kids spent the week in lessons. It’s paying off: they’re both improving fast, and the eldest has got all the essentials down and it’s working on improving her parallel turns and on “reading the mountain”. It’s absolutely possible that the eldest, and perhaps both of them, will be a better skier than me someday2.

I’m not perfect, mind. While skiing backwards and filming, I misjudged the height of an arch and hit the back of the head with it… despite the child shouting to warn me! 😅

Maybe, as part of my effort to do what I’m bad at, I should have another go at learning to snowboard. I always found snowboarding frustrating because everything I needed to re-learn was something that I could already do much better and easier on skis. But perhaps if I can reframe that frustration through the lens of learning itself as the destination, I might be in a better place. One to consider for next time I hit the piste.

Footnotes

1 Also a little geocaching and some mountainside Where’s Wally?

2 Assuming snow is still a thing in ten years time.

In black skiwear, Dan looks into the camera from a bench in the snow, his skis upright behind him.× A snow-covered Alpine glacier sandwiched into a gully of exposed rocks.×

Shiftless Progressive Enhancement

Progressive enhancement is a great philosophy for Web application development. Deliver all the essential basic functionality using the simplest standards available; use advanced technologies to add bonus value and convenience features for users whose platform supports them. Win.

Screenshot showing starcharts in Three Rings. With JS disabled, all shifts within the last 3 years are shown, with a link to show historic shifts. With JS enabled, only shifts from the current calendar year are shown, with filters available to dynamically change which year(s) are covered.
JavaScript disabled/enabled is one of the most-fundamental ways to differentiate a basic from an enhanced experience, but it’s absolutely not the only way (especially now that feature detection in JavaScript and in CSS has become so powerful!).

In Three Rings, for example, volunteers can see a “starchart” of the volunteering shifts they’ve done recently, at-a-glance, on their profile page1. In the most basic case, this is usable in its HTML-only form: even with no JavaScript, no CSS, no images even, it still functions. But if JavaScript is enabled, the volunteer can dynamically “filter” the year(s) of volunteering they’re viewing. Basic progressive enhancement.

If a feature requires JavaScript, my usual approach is to use JavaScript to add the relevant user interface to the page in the first place. Those starchart filters in Three Rings don’t appear at all if JavaScript is disabled. A downside to this approach is that the JavaScript necessarily modifies the DOM on page load, which introduces a delay to the page being interactive as well as potentially resulting in layout shift.

That’s not always the best approach. I was reminded of this today by the website of 7-year-old Shiro (produced with, one assumes, at least a little help from Saneef H. Ansari). Take a look at this progressively-enhanced theme switcher:

No layout shift, no DOM manipulation. And yet it’s still pretty clear what features are available.

The HTML that’s delivered over-the-wire provides a disabled <select> element, which gains the CSS directive cursor: not-allowed;, to make it clear to the used that this dropdown doesn’t do anything. The whole thing’s wrapped in a custom element.

When that custom element is defined by the JavaScript, it enhances the dropdown with an event listener that implements the theme changes, then enables the disabled <select>.

<color-schemer>
  <form>
    <label>
      Theme
      <select disabled>
        <option value="">System</option>
        <option value="dark">Dark</option>
        <option value="light" selected>Light</option>
      </select>
    </label>
  </form>
</color-schemer>
I’m not convinced by the necessity of the <form> if there’s no HTML-only fallback… and the <label> probably should use a for="..." rather than wrapping the <select>, but otherwise this code is absolutely gorgeous.

It’s probably no inconvenience to the minority of JS-less users to see a theme switcher than, when they go to use it, turns out to be disabled. But it saves time for virtually everybody not to have to wait for JavaScript to manipulate the DOM, or else to risk shifting the layout by revealing a previously-hidden element.

Altogether, this is a really clever approach, and I was pleased today to be reminded – by a 7-year-old! – of the elegance of this approach. Nice one Shiro (and Saneef!).

Footnotes

1 Assuming that administrators at the organisation where they volunteer enable this feature for them, of course: Three Rings‘ permission model is robust and highly-customisable. Okay, that’s enough sales pitch.

Screenshot showing starcharts in Three Rings. With JS disabled, all shifts within the last 3 years are shown, with a link to show historic shifts. With JS enabled, only shifts from the current calendar year are shown, with filters available to dynamically change which year(s) are covered.×

100 Days To Offload

The ever-excellent Kev Quirk in 2020 came up with this challenge: write a blog post on each of 100 consecutive days. He called it #100DaysToOffload, in nominal reference to the “100 days of code” challenge. I was reflecting upon this as I reach this, my 36th consecutive day of blogging and my longest ever “daily streak” (itself a spin-off of my attempt at Bloganuary this year), and my 48th post of the year so far.

Monochrome photograph showing sprinters at the starting line.
I guess I’ve always been more of a sprinter/hurdles blogger than a marathon runner.

Might I meet that challenge? Maybe. But it turns out it’s easier than I thought because Kev revised the rules to require only 100 posts in a calendar year (or any other 365-day period, but I’m not going to start thinking about the maths of that).

That’s not only much more-achievable… I’ve probably already achieved it! Let’s knock out some SQL to check how many posts I made each year:

SELECT
  YEAR(wp_posts.post_date_gmt) yyyy,
  COUNT(wp_posts.ID) total
FROM
  wp_posts
WHERE
  wp_posts.post_status='publish'
  AND wp_posts.post_type='post'
GROUP BY yyyy
ORDER BY yyyy
My code’s actually a little more-complicated than this, because of some plot, but this covers the essentials.

A big question in some years is what counts as a post. Kev’s definition is quite liberal and includes basically-everything, but I wonder if mine shouldn’t perhaps be stricter. For example:

  • Should I count checkins, even though they’re not always born as blog posts but often start as logs on geocaching websites? (My gut says yes!)
  • Do reposts and bookmarks contribute, a significant minority of which are presented without any further interpretation by me? (My gut says no!)
  • Does a vlog version of a blog post count separately, or is it a continuation of the same content? (My gut says the volume is too low to matter!)
  • Can a retroactive achievement (i.e. from before the challenge was announced) count? Kev writes “there is no specific start date”, but it seems a little counter to the idea of it specifically being a challenge to claim it when you weren’t attempting the challenge at the time.
  • And so on…
Year Posts Success? Notes
1998 7 ❌ No
1999 66 ❌ No
2000 2 ❌ No
2001 11 ❌ No
2002 5 ❌ No
2003 189
(178 for pedants)
🏆 Yes Achieved 1 September, with a post about an article on The Register about timewasting. Or, if we allow reposts, three days earlier with a repost about Claire's car being claimed by the sea.
2004 374
(364 for pedants)
🏆 Yes An early win on 20 April, with a made-up Chez Geek card. Or if we allow reposts, two days earlier with thoughts on a confusing pro-life (???) website.
2005 381
(300 for pedants)
🏆 Yes In a highly-productive year of blogging, achieved on 7 April with a post about enjoy curry and public information films with friends. If we allow bookmarks (I was highly-active on del.icio.us at the time!), achieved even earlier on 18 February with some links to curious websites.
2006 206
(177 for pedants)
🏆 Yes On 21 July, I shared a personality test (which was actually my effort to repeat an experiment in using Barnum-Forer statements) - I didn't initially give away that I was the author of the "test". Non-pedants will agree I achieved the goal earlier, on 19 June, with my thoughts on a programming language for a hypothetical infinitely-fast computer.
2007 166
(160 for pedants)
🏆 Yes Achieved on 2 July with thoughts on films I'd watched and board games I'd played recently. Or arguably 12 days earlier with Claire's birthday trip to Manchester.
2008 86 ❌ No
2009 79 ❌ No
2010 159
(84 for pedants)
✅ Yes* A heartfelt post about saying goodbye to Aberystwyth as I moved to Oxford on 16 June was my 100th of the year. Pedants might argue that this year shouldn't count, but so long as you're willing to count checkins (and you should) then it would... and my qualifying post would have come only a couple of days later, with a post about the Headington Shark, which I had just moved-in near to.
2011 177
(112 for pedants)
🏆 Yes Reached the goal on 28 October when I wrote about mild successes in my enquiries with the Office of National Statistics about ensuring that information about polyamorous households was accurately recorded. Or if we earlier on 9 June with a visual gag about REM lyrics if you accept all my geocache logs as posts too (and again: you should).
2012 129
(87 for pedants)
✅ Yes* My 100th post of the year came on 28 August when I wrote about launching a bus named after my recently-deceased father. You have to be willing to accept both checkins and reposts as posts to allow this year to count.
2013 138
(59 for pedants)
😓 Probably not I'm not convined this low-blogging year should count: a clear majority of the posts were geocaching logs, and they weren't always even that verbose (consider this candidate for 100th post of 2013, from 1 October).
2014 335
(22 for pedants)
🙁 Not really Another geocache log heavy, conventional blogpost light year that I'm not convinced should count, evem if the obvious candidate for 100th post would be 18 May's cool article about geocaching like Batman!
2015 205
(18 for pedants)
🙁 Not really Still no, for the same reasons as above.
2016 163
(37 for pedants)
🙁 Not really Still no, for the same reasons as above.
2017 301
(42 for pedants)
🙁 Not really Still no, for the same reasons as above.
2018 547
(87 for pedants)
✅ Yes* I maintain that checkins should count, even when they're PESOS'd from geocaching sites, so long as they don't make up a majority of the qualifying posts in a year. In which case this year should qualify, with the 100th post being my visit to this well-hidden London pub while on my way to a conference.
2019 387
(86 for pedants)
✅ Yes* Similarly this year, when on 15 August I visited a GNSS calibration point in the San Francisco Bay Area... on the way to another conference!
2020 221
(64 for pedants)
✅ Yes* Barely made it this year (ignoring reposts, of which I did lots), with my 21 December article about a little-known (and under-supported) way to inject CSS using HTTP headers, which I later used to make a web page for which View Souce showed nothing.
2021 190
(57 for pedants)
✅ Yes* A cycle to a nearby geocache was the checkin that made the 100th post of this year, on 27 August.
2022 168
(55 for pedants)
✅ Yes* My efforts to check up on one of my own geocaches on 7 September scored the qualifying spot.
2023 164
(86 for pedants)
✅ Yes* My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport.
2024 69 ⌛ Not yet...

* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.

In any case, I’d argue that I clearly achieved the revised version of the challenge on certainly six, probably fourteen, arguably (depending on how you count posts) as many as nineteen different years since I started blogging in 1998. My least-controversial claims would be:

  1. September 2003, with Timewasting
  2. April 2004, with Chez Geek Card of the Day
  3. April 2005, with Curry with Alec and Suz
  4. July 2006, with Coolest Personality Test I’ve Ever Seen
  5. July 2007, with It’s All Fun and Games
  6. June 2010, with Saying Goodbye
  7. October 2011, with Poly and the Census – Success! (almost)
  8. August 2012, with A Bus Called Peter
  9. June 2018, with Dan Q found GLW6CMKQ 16th Century Pub (Central London) 
  10. August 2019, with Dan Q found GC6KR0H Bay Area Calibration Point #4 – New Technology
  11. December 2020, with The Fourth Way to Inject CSS
  12. August 2021, with Dan Q found GC531M9 Walk by the Firehouse #1
  13. October 2022, with Dan Q performed maintenance for GC9Z37H Friar’s Farm – Woodland Walk
  14. August 2023, with Inclusivity

Given all these unanswered questions, I’m not going to just go ahead and raise a PR against the Hall of Fame! Instead, I’ll leave it to Kev to decide whether I’m (a) eligible to claim a 14-time award, (b) merely eligible for a 4-time award for the years following the challenge starting, or (c) ineligible to claim success until I intentionally post 100 times in a year (in, at current rates, another two months…). Over to you, Kev…

Update: Kev’s agreed that I can claim the most-recent four of them, so I raised a PR.

Monochrome photograph showing sprinters at the starting line.×

Oldest Digital Photo… of Me

Some younger/hipper friends tell me that there was a thing going around on Instagram this week where people post photos of themselves aged 21.

I might not have any photos of myself aged 21! I certainly can’t find any digital ones…

Dan, aged 22, stands in a cluttered flat with his partner Claire and several members of Dan's family.
The closest I can manage is this photo from 23 April 2003, when I was 22 years old.

It must sound weird to young folks nowadays, but prior to digital photography going mainstream in the 2000s (thanks in big part to the explosion of popularity of mobile phones), taking a photo took effort:

  • Most folks didn’t carry their cameras everywhere with them, ready-to-go, so photography was much more-intentional.
  • The capacity of a film only allowed you to take around 24 photos before you’d need to buy a new one and swap it out (which took much longer than swapping a memory card).
  • You couldn’t even look at the photos you’d taken until they were developed, which you couldn’t do until you finished the roll of film and which took at least hours – more-realistically days – and incurred an additional cost.

I didn’t routinely take digital photos until after Claire and I got together in 2002 (she had a digital camera, with which the photo above was taken). My first cameraphone – I was a relatively early-adopter – was a Nokia 7650, bought late that same year.

It occurs to me that I take more photos in a typical week nowadays, than I took in a typical year circa 2000.

Monochrome photo of a toddler, smiling broadly, pointing at the camera.
The oldest analogue photo of me that I own was taken on 2 October 1982, when I was 22 months old.

This got me thinking: what’s the oldest digital photo that exists, of me. So I went digging.

I might not have owned a digital camera in the 1990s, but my dad’s company owned one with which to collect pictures when working on-site. It was a Sony MVC-FD7, a camera most-famous for its quirky use of 3½” floppy disks as media (this was cheap and effective, but meant the camera was about the size and weight of a brick and took about 10 seconds to write each photo from RAM to the disk, during which it couldn’t do anything else).

In Spring 1998, almost 26 years ago, I borrowed it and took, among others, this photo:

Dan aged 17 - a young white man with platinum blonde shoulder-length hair - stands in front of a pink wall, holding up a large, boxy digital camera.
I’m aged 17 in what’s probably the oldest surviving digital photo of me, looking like a refugee from Legoland in 640×480 glorious pixels.

I’m confident a picture of me was taken by a Connectix QuickCam (an early webcam) in around 1996, but I can’t imagine it still exists.

So unless you’re about to comment to tell me know you differently and have an older picture of me: that snap of me taking my own photo with a bathroom mirror is the oldest digital photo of me that exists.

Dan, aged 22, stands in a cluttered flat with his partner Claire and several members of Dan's family.× Monochrome photo of a toddler, smiling broadly, pointing at the camera.× Dan aged 17 - a young white man with platinum blonde shoulder-length hair - stands in front of a pink wall, holding up a large, boxy digital camera.×

Netscape’s Untold Webstories

I mentioned yesterday that during Bloganuary I’d put non-Bloganuary-prompt post ideas onto the backburner, and considered extending my daily streak by posting them in February. Here’s part of my attempt to do that:

Let’s take a trip into the Web of yesteryear, with thanks to our friends at the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine.

The page we’re interested in used to live at http://www.netscape.com/comprod/columns/webstories/index.html, and promised to be a showcase for best practice in Web development. Back in October 1996, it looked like this:

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to debut in November."

The page is a placeholder for Netscape Webstories (or Web Site Stories, in some places). It’s part of a digital magazine called Netscape Columns which published pieces written by Marc Andreeson, Jim Barksdale, and other bigwigs in the hugely-influential pre-AOL-acquisition Netscape Communications.

This new series would showcase best practice in designing and building Web sites1, giving a voice to the technical folks best-placed to speak on that topic. That sounds cool!

Those white boxes above and below the paragraph of text aren’t missing images, by the way: they’re horizontal rules, using the little-known size attribute to specify a thickness of <hr size=4>!2

Certainly you’re excited by this new column and you’ll come back in November 1996, right?

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in January."

Oh. The launch has been delayed, I guess. Now it’s coming in January.

The <hr>s look better now their size has been reduced, though, so clearly somebody’s paying attention to the page. But let’s take a moment and look at that page title. If you grew up writing web pages in the modern web, you might anticipate that it’s coded something like this:

<h2 style="font-variant: small-caps; text-align: center;">Coming Soon</h2>

There’s plenty of other ways to get that same effect. Perhaps you prefer font-feature-settings: 'smcp' in your chosen font; that’s perfectly valid. Maybe you’d use margin: 0 auto or something to centre it: I won’t judge.

But no, that’s not how this works. The actual code for that page title is:

<center>
  <h2>
    <font size="+3">C</font>OMING
    <font size="+3">S</font>OON
  </h2>
</center>

Back when this page was authored, we didn’t have CSS3. The only styling elements were woven right in amongst the semantic elements of a page4. It was simple to understand and easy to learn… but it was a total mess5.

Anyway, let’s come back in January 1997 and see what this feature looks like when it’s up-and-running.

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in the spring."

Nope, now it’s pushed back to “the spring”.

Under Construction pages were all the rage back in the nineties. Everybody had one (or several), usually adorned with one or more of about a thousand different animated GIFs for that purpose.6

Rotating animated "under construction" banner.

Building “in public” was an act of commitment, a statement of intent, and an act of acceptance of the incompleteness of a digital garden. They’re sort-of coming back into fashion in the interpersonal Web, with the “garden and stream” metaphor7 taking root. This isn’t anything new, of course – Mark Bernstein touched on the concepts in 1998 – but it’s not something that I can ever see returning to the “serious” modern corporate Web: but if you’ve seen a genuine, non-ironic “under construction” page published to a non-root page of a company’s website within the last decade, please let me know!

Under construction banner with an animated yellow-and-black tape banner between two "men at work" signs.

RSS doesn’t exist yet (although here’s a fun fact: the very first version of RSS came out of Netscape!). We’re just going to have to bookmark the page and check back later in the year, I guess…

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page identical to the previous version but with a search box ("To search the Netscape Columns, type a word or phrase here:") beneath.

Okay, so February clearly isn’t Spring, but they’ve updated the page… to add a search form.

It’s a genuine <form> tag, too, not one of those old-fashioned <isindex> tags you’d still sometimes find even as late as 1997. Interestingly, it specifies enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded". Today’s developers probably don’t think about the enctype attribute except when they’re doing a form that handles file uploads and they know they need to switch it to enctype="multipart/form-data", (or their framework does this automatically for them!).

But these aren’t the only options, and some older browsers at this time still defaulted to enctype="text/plain".  So long as you’re using a POST and not GET method, the distinction is mostly academic, but if your backend CGI program anticipates that special characters will come-in encoded, back then you’d be wise to specify that you wanted URL-encoding or you might get a nasty surprise when somebody turns up using LMB or something equally-exotic.

Anyway, let’s come back in June. The content must surely be up by now:

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in August."

Oh come on! Now we’re waiting until August?

At least the page isn’t abandoned. Somebody’s coming back and editing it from time to time to let us know about the still-ongoing series of delays. And that’s not a trivial task: this isn’t a CMS. They’re probably editing the .html file itself in their favourite text editor, then putting the appropriate file:// address into their copy of Netscape Navigator (and maybe other browsers) to test it, then uploading the file – probably using FTP – to the webserver… all the while thanking their lucky stars that they’ve only got the one page they need to change.

We didn’t have scripting languages like PHP yet, you see8. We didn’t really have static site generators. Most servers didn’t implement server-side includes. So if you had to make a change to every page on a site, for example editing the main navigation menu, you’d probably have to open and edit dozens or even hundreds of pages. Little wonder that framesets caught on, despite their (many) faults, with their ability to render your navigation separately from your page content.

Okay, let’s come back in August I guess:

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in the spring." Again.

Now we’re told that we’re to come back… in the Spring again? That could mean Spring 1998, I suppose… or it could just be that somebody accidentally re-uploaded an old copy of the page.

Hey: the footer’s gone too? This is clearly a partial re-upload: somebody realised they were accidentally overwriting the page with the previous-but-one version, hit “cancel” in their FTP client (or yanked the cable out of the wall), and assumed that they’d successfully stopped the upload before any damage was done.

They had not.

Screenshot of a Windows 95 dialog box, asking "Are you sure you want to delete index.html?" The cursor hovers over the "Yes" button.

I didn’t mention that top menu, did I? It looks like it’s a series of links, styled to look like flat buttons, right? But you know that’s not possible because you can’t rely on having the right fonts available: plus you’d have to do some <table> trickery to lay it out, at which point you’d struggle to ensure that the menu was the same width as the banner above it. So how did they do it?

The menu is what’s known as a client-side imagemap. Here’s what the code looks like:

<a href="/comprod/columns/images/nav.map">
  <img src="/comprod/columns/images/websitestories_ban.gif" width=468 height=32 border=0 usemap="#maintopmap" ismap>
</a><map name="mainmap">
  <area coords="0,1,92,24" href="/comprod/columns/mainthing/index.html">
  <area coords="94,1,187,24" href="/comprod/columns/techvision/index.html">
  <area coords="189,1,278,24" href="/comprod/columns/webstories/index.html">
  <area coords="280,1,373,24" href="/comprod/columns/intranet/index.html">
  <area coords="375,1,467,24" href="/comprod/columns/newsgroup/index.html">
</map>

The image (which specifies border=0 because back then the default behaviour for graphical browser was to put a thick border around images within hyperlinks) says usemap="#maintopmap" to cross-reference the <map> below it, which defines rectangular areas on the image and where they link to, if you click them! This ingenious and popular approach meant that you could transmit a single image – saving on HTTP round-trips, which were relatively time-consuming before widespread adoption of HTTP/1.1‘s persistent connections – along with a little metadata to indicate which pixels linked to which pages.

The ismap attribute is provided as a fallback for browsers that didn’t yet support client-side image maps but did support server-side image maps: there were a few! When you put ismap on an image within a hyperlink, then when the image is clicked on the href has appended to it a query parameter of the form ?123,456, where those digits refer to the horizontal and vertical coordinates, from the top-left, of the pixel that was clicked on! These could then be decoded by the webserver via a .map file or handled by a CGI program. Server-side image maps were sometimes used where client-side maps were undesirable, e.g. when you want to record the actual coordinates picked in a spot-the-ball competition or where you don’t want to reveal in advance which hotspot leads to what destination, but mostly they were just used as a fallback.9

Both client-side and server-side image maps still function in every modern web browser, but I’ve not seen them used in the wild for a long time, not least because they’re hard (maybe impossible?) to make accessible and they can’t cope with images being resized, but also because nowadays if you really wanted to make an navigation “image” you’d probably cut it into a series of smaller images and make each its own link.

Anyway, let’s come back in October 1997 and see if they’ve fixed their now-incomplete page:

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: the Coming Soon page is now laid out in two columns, but the expected launch date has been removed.

Oh, they have! From the look of things, they’ve re-written the page from scratch, replacing the version that got scrambled by that other employee. They’ve swapped out the banner and menu for a new design, replaced the footer, and now the content’s laid out in a pair of columns.

There’s still no reliable CSS, so you’re not looking at columns: (no implementations until 2014) nor at display: flex (2010) here. What you’re looking at is… a fixed-width <table> with a single row and three columns! Yes: three – the middle column is only 10 pixels wide and provides the “gap” between the two columns of text.10

This wasn’t Netscape’s only option, though. Did you ever hear of the <multicol> tag? It was the closest thing the early Web had to a semantically-sound, progressively-enhanced multi-column layout! The author of this page could have written this:

<multicol cols=2 gutter=10 width=301>
  <p>
    Want to create the best possible web site? Join us as we explore the newest
    technologies, discover the coolest tricks, and learn the best secrets for
    designing, building, and maintaining successful web sites.
  </p>
  <p>
    Members of the Netscape web site team, recognized designers, and technical
    experts will share their insights and experiences in Web Site Stories. 
  </p>
</multicol>

That would have given them the exact same effect, but with less code and it would have degraded gracefully. Browsers ignore tags they don’t understand, so a browser without support for <multicol> would have simply rendered the two paragraphs one after the other. Genius!

So why didn’t they? Probably because <multicol> only ever worked in Netscape Navigator.

Introduced in 1996 for version 3.0, this feature was absolutely characteristic of the First Browser War. The two “superpowers”, Netscape and Microsoft, both engaged in unilateral changes to the HTML specification, adding new features and launching them without announcement in order to try to get the upper hand over the other. Both sides would often refuse to implement one-another’s new tags unless they were forced to by widespread adoption by page authors, instead promoting their own competing mechanisms11.

Between adding this new language feature to their browser and writing this page, Netscape’s market share had fallen from around 80% to around 55%, and most of their losses were picked up by IE. Using <multicol> would have made their page look worse in Microsoft’s hot up-and-coming browser, which wouldn’t have helped them persuade more people to download a copy of Navigator and certainly wouldn’t be a good image on a soon-to-launch (any day now!) page about best-practice on the Web! So Netscape’s authors opted for the dominant, cross-platform solution on this page12.

Anyway, let’s fast-forward a bit and see this project finally leave its “under construction” phase and launch!

Screenshot showing the homepage of Netscape Columns from 15 February 1998; the first recorded copy NOT to have a header link to the Webstories / Web Site Stories page.

Oh. It’s gone.

Sometime between October 1997 and February 1998 the long promised “Web Site Stories” section of Netscape Columns quietly disappeared from the website. Presumably, it never published a single article, instead remaining a perpetual “Coming Soon” page right up until the day it was deleted.

I’m not sure if there’s a better metaphor for Netscape’s general demeanour in 1998 – the year in which they finally ceased to be the dominant market leader in web browsers – than the quiet deletion of a page about how Netscape customers are making the best of the Web. This page might not have been important, or significant, or even completed, but its disappearance may represent Netscape’s refocus on trying to stay relevant in the face of existential threat.

Of course, Microsoft won the First Browser War. They did so by pouring a fortune’s worth of developer effort into staying technologically one-step ahead, refusing to adopt standards proposed by their rival, and their unprecedented decision to give away their browser for free13.

Footnotes

1 Yes, we used to write “Web sites” as two words. We also used to consistently capitalise the words Web and Internet. Some of us still do so.

2 In case it’s not clear, this blog post is going to be as much about little-known and archaic Web design techniques as it is about Netscape’s website.

3 This is a white lie. CSS was first proposed almost at the same time as the Web! Microsoft Internet Explorer was first to deliver a partial implementation of the initial standard, late in 1996, but Netscape dragged their heels, perhaps in part because they’d originally backed a competing standard called JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS). JSSS had a lot going for it: if it had enjoyed widespread adoption, for example, we’d have had the equivalent of CSS variables a full twenty years earlier! In any case, back in 1996 you definitely wouldn’t want to rely on CSS support.

4 Wondering where the text and link colours come from? <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#ff0000" alink="#ff0000">. Yes really, that’s where we used to put our colours.

5 Personally, I really loved the aesthetic Netscape touted when using Times New Roman (or whatever serif font was available on your computer: webfonts weren’t a thing yet) with temporary tweaks to font sizes, and I copied it in some of my own sites. If you look back at my 2018 blog post celebrating two decades of blogging, where I’ve got a screenshot of my blog as it looked circa 1999, you’ll see that I used exactly this technique for the ordinal suffixes on my post dates! On the same post, you’ll see that I somewhat replicated the “feel” of it again in my 2011 design, this time using a stylesheet.

6 There’s a whole section of Cameron’s World dedicated to “under construction” banners, and that’s a beautiful thing!

7 The idea of “garden and stream” is that you publish early and often, refining as you go, in your garden, which can act as an extension of whatever notetaking system you use already, but publish mostly “finished” content to your (chronological) stream. I see an increasing number of IndieWeb bloggers going down this route, but I’m not convinced that it’s for me.

8 Another white lie. PHP was released way back in 1995 and even the very first version supported something a lot like server-side includes, using the syntax <!--include /file/name.html-->. But it was a little computationally-intensive to run willy-nilly.

9 Server-side imagemaps are enjoying a bit of a renaissance on .onion services, whose visitors often keep JavaScript disabled, to make image-based CAPTCHAs. Simply show the visitor an image and describe the bit you want them to click on, e.g. “the blue pentagon with one side missing”, then compare the coordinates of the pixel they click on to the knowledge of the right answer. Highly-inaccessible, of course, but innovative from a purely-technical perspective.

10 Nowadays, use of tables for layout – or, indeed, for anything other than tabular data – is very-much frowned upon: it’s often bad for accessibility and responsive design. But back before we had the features granted to us by the modern Web, it was literally the only way to get content to appear side-by-side on a page, and designers got incredibly creative about how they misused tables to lay out content, especially as browsers became more-sophisticated and began to support cells that spanned multiple rows or columns, tables “nested” within one another, and background images.

11 It was a horrible time to be a web developer: having to make hacky workarounds in order to make use of the latest features but still support the widest array of browsers. But I’d still take that over the horrors of rendering engine monoculture!

12 Or maybe they didn’t even think about it and just copy-pasted from somewhere else on their site. I’m speculating.

13 This turned out to be the master-stroke: not only did it partially-extricate Microsoft from their agreement with Spyglass Inc., who licensed their browser engine to Microsoft in exchange for a percentage of sales value, but once Microsoft started bundling Internet Explorer with Windows it meant that virtually every computer came with their browser factory-installed! This strategy kept Microsoft on top until Firefox and Google Chrome kicked-off the Second Browser War in the early 2010s. But that’s another story.

Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to debut in November."× Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in January."× Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in the spring."× Rotating animated "under construction" banner.× Under construction banner with an animated yellow-and-black tape banner between two "men at work" signs.× Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page identical to the previous version but with a search box ("To search the Netscape Columns, type a word or phrase here:") beneath.× Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in August."× Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: a Coming Soon page which says "The series is scheduled to begin in the spring." Again.× Screenshot of a Windows 95 dialog box, asking "Are you sure you want to delete index.html?" The cursor hovers over the "Yes" button.× Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: the Coming Soon page is now laid out in two columns, but the expected launch date has been removed.× Screenshot showing the homepage of Netscape Columns from 15 February 1998; the first recorded copy NOT to have a header link to the Webstories / Web Site Stories page.×

Reflecting on Bloganuary

Well that was Bloganuary! It was pressuring, exhausting, and – mostly! – fun. Let’s recap what I wrote about each day of January:

  1. My Biggest Challenge, for which I pointed at motivation in the winter and how that was a major part of my motivation for trying to participate in Bloganuary in the first place! I also touched on the difficulty of staying on-task.
Chart showing number of articles on DanQ.me by month of year, with a pronounced dip starting in January and continuing through until a rebound in April.
Early in January I shared this chart which indicates the severity of the “dip” I typically see in my blog output in the first few months of the year. Could I overcome this through sheer determination, I wondered?
  1. Playtime. I talked about some of the “play” activities I engage in, including roleplaying games, board games, videogames, escape rooms, and GNSS games.
  2. Alumnus: an exploration of the higher education establishments I’ve been part of.
  3. The Gift of Time, when I talked about being time-poor and seemingly perpetually-busy and expressed my love of gifts that help me reclaim that time.
  4. Nostalgia vs Futurism. I spend comparable amounts of time thinking about the future as the past, I reckon.
  5. Billboards: a silly joke about a billboard.
  6. A Different Diet, talking about aspiring towards something slightly-closer to veganism, perhaps starting by reducing my dairy consumption.
  7. Live Long and Prosper, in which I commemorate my birthday by talking about the dangers of humans living much longer than they do.
  8. Mission, another silly joke.
King Arthur again, but now he says "I wanna, like, make cool shit on the Internet or whatever."
You and me both, Arthur, King of the Britons.
  1. Attachment, about how I didn’t really have an “attachment object” as a kid.
  2. Paws to Hear my Scents-ible Idea: a silly pitch for a smell-based social network for dogs.
  3. Pizza, a post about the greatest food ever invented.
  4. Road Trip! After ruling out a series of runners-up, perhaps my most-memorable road trip was the one to Kit’s wedding.
  5. Communicate Early, Communicate Often, about the ways I communicate online (spoiler: a lot of it’s right here!).
  6. Magpies are the Best Bird. Nay, the best animal.
  7. Clutter, about the clutter in my physical space but perhaps even more in my head.
  8. Puppy Love: the unconditional love of a dog.
  9. Uninvention, in which I propose uninventing cryptocurrency.
  10. Leadership: I revisited an old post about the qualities I admire in leaders; it’s still true.
  11. Dream Job – am I already doing my dream job? Maybe, though perhaps it isn’t the one that pays me!
  12. What’s in a name? My name today is one I chose for myself, but it’s not the only name I’ve been known by. I revisit the names I’ve been called and what they’ve meant.
  13. New Tricks, about how convenient it’d be to be able to explain to our dog that the builders in our house are not here to steal her toys.
  14. Fun Five: five things I do for fun – code, magic, play, piano, learn. A bit of a parallel to “Playtime” from day 2.
  1. Harcourt Manor, a local attraction I’ve never gotten to see inside.
  2. Landslide, the spectacular song that inspired this post because I didn’t objected to the original prompt.
  3. Traditions my family practices, some of which are pretty unique to us.
  4. Reading List, about how mine is pretty long this time of year, but that doesn’t stop me thinking about what I might re-read next.
  5. Not The Lottery, a game I play that’s… well… not the lottery. And how if I played the actual lottery (and somehow won), how I’d do my “dream job” from day 18.
  6. Sportsball! I don’t really play or follow any sports, but that doesn’t stop me writing a diatribe of what’s wrong with professional soccer.
  7. Toilet Paper is typically mounted on a holder in one of two polarities. One of those orientations is an abomination.
  8. The Fear of expressing vulnerability is real in this final Bloganuary entry.

So yeah: 31 posts in as many days! Actually, it was closer to 40, because on a couple of days I wrote non-Bloganuary posts too:

Generating a chart...
If this message doesn't go away, the JavaScript that makes this magic work probably isn't doing its job right: please tell Dan so he can fix it.

Of course, with the addition of this post, it’s now 32+ posts in 32 days. As I’ve noted before, this is my longest daily streak in over 25 years of blogging… and I’m genuinely a little curious how much longer I can keep it up. There are lots of things I meant to write about last month but simply didn’t have time: if I dusted off a few of those ideas I could push on a few days longer. My longest unstreak or “dry spell” – the longest number of consecutive days I’ve gone without making a post – is 42 days: could I beat that? That’d be a special level of personal best.

Trophy on a desk with the plaque "most pointless blog posts".
Wait, is that “most pointless” in quality, or most “pointless posts” as in quantity?

I initially aimed to fuel and inspire my blogging at the start of this year in a more-interpersonal way, by making some pen pals and writing about the experience of that. Except I ran slightly late with my first (and haven’t written it up yet) and even later with my second (on account of winter blues plus spending any spare “blogging” time doing Bloganuary) so that project’s already way off track. Still aiming to catch-up though.

But I’m pleased to have been able to throw out 20,000 words of prompt-driven blog posts too, even if some of the prompts were weaker than others!

Chart showing number of articles on DanQ.me by month of year, with a pronounced dip starting in January and continuing through until a rebound in April.× King Arthur again, but now he says "I wanna, like, make cool shit on the Internet or whatever."× Trophy on a desk with the plaque "most pointless blog posts".×

[Bloganuary] The Fear

This post is the final part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?

After a few wishy-washy prompts earlier in the month1, suddenly this is a spicy one!

Tabby kitten hiding under a rug.
“I’mma just hide here until next Bloganuary and do one of those prompts instead, a’ight?”

I’ve had sufficient opportunity to confidently answer: I’m most-scared… to express personal vulnerability.

For example –

  • I’m prone to concealing feelings of anxiety, shame, and insecurity (out of for concern that I’ll be perceived as weak);
  • I exhibit rejection sensitivity, especially when I’m under stress (which leads me to brush-off or minimise other people’s gratitude, respect, or even love);
  • It can be difficult for me to ask for what I want, rather than what I think I deserve (so my expressed-needs are at the whim of my self-worth).
Grey-brown kitten with Scottish Fold-style ears standing semi-upright on a light blue sofa with an expression that, were it on a human, would be described as fearful.
“Oh my god you’re actually typing this stuff onto the Internet‽ What will people think of you, Dan!”

Two things I oughta emphasise at this point:

  1. I’m doing much better than I used to.2 I “pass” as well-adjusted! My fear of vulnerability still causes me trouble, especially if I’m emotionally low or stressed, but nowhere near as badly as it used to.
  2. I’m still learning, growing, and improving. I’ve had the benefit of therapy3, coaching, and lots of self-reflection, and I’m moving in the right direction.

What would it take me to face or overcome this fear? I’m already working on it, day by day. Time and practice, just like you’d use to overcome any other obstacle. Time, and practice.

I’m glad that this challenging question came last in Bloganuary, after I felt sufficiently-invested that I had to finish. If this were the first question, I might never have started!

Footnotes

1 Obviously I’m thinking about day 25’s “what do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?”, to which I wouldn’t have been able to come up a fresh answer after already writing responses to day 2’s “do you play in your daily life?” and (especially) day 23’s “list five things you do for fun”.

2 The best evidence for the fact that I’m less afraid of expressing vulnerability than I used to be is… well, things like this blog post, which I couldn’t conceive of writing say a decade ago.

3 The primary motivation for my most-recent bouts of therapy wasn’t anything to do with this, but counselling helps you make connections that you otherwise might not! You can find yourself reverse-engineering a whole other part of yourself than what you expected.

Tabby kitten hiding under a rug.× Grey-brown kitten with Scottish Fold-style ears standing semi-upright on a light blue sofa with an expression that, were it on a human, would be described as fearful.×

[Bloganuary] Toilet Paper

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What do you complain about the most?

I’m British. So I complain about very little. Instead, I tut loudly to myself.

But the thing that makes me tut the loudest, perhaps, is when I discover that somebody has put a roll of toilet paper on its holder the wrong way.

Annotated composite photograph showing two toilet rolls on their holster. One hangs in front of the roll, as is correct and proper, and it labelled "right". The other hangs behind the roll, in the terrible forbidden way acceptable only to imbeciles, and is labelled "wrong".
Of all the hills a person could choose to die on, I seem to have chosen the most absorbent.

I’m aware that there are some people who do not hold a strong opinion on the correct orientation of a horizontally-mounted roll of toilet paper. That’s fine; not everybody has to care about these things. Maybe you’ll be persuaded that there’s a “right” way by this post (and there is), but if not, no problem.

But for the anybody who deliberately and consciously hangs toilet paper the wrong way… here’s why you’re mistaken:

  • Hanging it the right way puts the loose end closer to the user, which means they’ve got less-far to reach.
  • Hanging it the right way means the loose end is easier to find, which is especially useful if you didn’t turn the light on yet because you’re not ready to fully wake up.
  • Hanging it the wrong way increases the amount of time the paper spends cleaning the wall, which isn’t something I want or need it to be used to clean.
  • Hanging it the wrong way increases the risk that the loose end is in a place where it is inaccessible, sandwiched directly behind the roll and against the wall, requiring the user to manually turn the roll to expose it. When the same thing happens on a roll hung the right way (which is rarer on account of gravity) a pinched end self-corrects as soon as you pull the roll slightly away from the wall.
  • It’s been argued that your way is “tidier” because unused toilet paper sits closer to the wall which which it’s approximately parallel. Sure (although I disagree that it’s tidier, but that’s clearly subjective): but I counter that I don’t need it to be tidy, I need it to function.
A hanging toilet roll being shredded by a black cat.
I’m willing to concede that for some pet owners and parents, hanging the “wrong” way might discourage curious animals and toddlers from playing with the exposed end. But even that’s not a guarantee, as wrong-way-hanger Dan4th Nicholas discovered. Photo used under a CC-BY license.

I share a home with a wrong-way hanger, but about 13 years ago we came to a household agreement: I’d quietly “correct” any incorrectly-installed toilet rolls in shared bathrooms1, and nobody would deliberately switch them back2, and in exchange I’d refrain from trying to educate people about why they were wrong.3

Composite screengrab from Taskmaster Season 11 Episode 4 (Premature Conker) showing Mike Wozniak talking about an empty toilet roll tube perched on top of a closed pedal bin (rather than having been put inside it).
Like Mike Wozniak, I also have a pet hate for people leaving the cardboard tube from toilet paper rolls in suboptimal places, like on top of a closed pedal bin. But I don’t see so much of that.

(While researching this article, I was pleased to discover that no major emoji font depicts a toilet roll in the wrong orientation. 🧻🎉)

Footnotes

1 A man can do whatever the hell he likes in the comfort of his own en suite.

2 This clause was added after it became apparent that our then-housemate Paul decided it’d be a fun prank to go around the house reversing my corrections (not because he preferred the wrong way, but just to troll me!). Which I can admit was a fun prank… until I challenged him on it and he denied it, at which point it became gaslighting.

3 This doesn’t count as forcing an education on my household. My blog isn’t in your face: you can skip it any time you want. You can even lie and say you read it when you don’t; I won’t know, especially this month when I’ve been writing so prolifically – now on my longest-ever daily streak! – that I probably won’t even remember what I wrote about.

Annotated composite photograph showing two toilet rolls on their holster. One hangs in front of the roll, as is correct and proper, and it labelled "right". The other hangs behind the roll, in the terrible forbidden way acceptable only to imbeciles, and is labelled "wrong".× A hanging toilet roll being shredded by a black cat.× Composite screengrab from Taskmaster Season 11 Episode 4 (Premature Conker) showing Mike Wozniak talking about an empty toilet roll tube perched on top of a closed pedal bin (rather than having been put inside it).×

[Bloganuary] Sportsball!

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What are your favourite sports to watch and play?

I’ve never really been very sports-motivated. I enjoy casually participating, but I can’t really see the attraction in spectating most sports, most of the time1.

I’m a good team player at basketball, for sure.

My limited relationship with sports

There are several activities I enjoy doing that happen to overlap with sports: swimming, cycling, etc., but I’m not doing them as sports. By which I mean: I’m not doing them competitively (and I don’t expect that to change).

I used to appreciate a game of badminton once in a while, and I’ve plenty of times enjoyed kicking a ball around with whoever’s there (party guests… the kids… the dog…2). But again, I’ve not really done any competitive sports since I used to play rugby at school, way back in the day3.

Dan, wearing a red t-shirt and in bright sunshine, pretends (badly) to be shouting excitedly. In the background, a group of people are watching a televised rugby match; one is wearing a South African flag as a cape.
“Yay, sports‽” This photo was taken in a Cape Town bar which was screening the 2019 Rugby World Cup final between England and South Africa. Much as I didn’t care about the sports, I loved the energy and atmosphere that the fans brought (and I’ve sufficient comprehension of the sport to appreciate that South Africa played a spectacular game, putting up an unstoppable wall of players to overcome the odds and take home the cup).

I guess I don’t really see the point in spectating sports that I don’t have any personal investment in. Which for me means that it’d have to involve somebody I care about!

A couple of dozen strangers running about for 90 minutes does nothing for me, because I haven’t the patriotism to care who wins or loses. But put one of my friends or family on the pitch and I might take an interest4!

What went wrong with football, for example

In some ways, the commercialisation of sport seems to me to be… just a bit sad?

Take soccer (association football), for example, whose explosive success in the United Kingdom helped bolster the worldwide appeal it enjoys today.

Up until the late 19th century soccer was exclusively an amateur sport: people played on teams on evenings and weekends and then went back to their day jobs the rest of the time. In fact, early football leagues in the UK specifically forbade professional players!5

Monochrome line drawing showing a 19th century scene of a football match. The ball appears to have been headed towards the goal by a jumping player; the goalkeeper is poised to dive for it.
Back in the 19th century the rules hadn’t been fully-standardised, either. If you look carefully at this contemporaneous picture, you’ll see that all these players are wearing the same kit, because there’s only one team. Also, the goalkeeper is wearing riding chaps because he’s permitted to bring his horse onto the pitch for up to 13 minutes in each match. I may or may not be making all of that up.

As leagues grew beyond local inter-village tournaments and reached the national stage, this approach gave an unfair advantage to teams in the South of England over those in the North and in Scotland. You see, the South had a larger proportion of landed gentry (who did not need to go back to a “day job” and could devote more of their time to practice) and a larger alumni of public schools (which had a long history with the sport in some variation or another)!6

Clamour from the Northern teams to be allowed to employ professional players eventually lead to changes in the rules to permit paid team members so long as they lived within a certain distance of the home pitch7. The “locality” rule for professional players required that the player had been born, or had lived for two years, within the vicinity of the club. People turned up to cheer on the local boys8, paid their higher season ticket prices to help fund not only the upkeep of the ground and the team’s travel but now also their salaries. Still all fine.

Things went wrong when the locality rule stopped applying. Now teams were directly competing with one another for players, leading to bidding wars. The sums of money involved in signing players began to escalate. Clubs merged (no surprise that so many of those “Somewheretown United” teams sprung up around this period) and grew larger and begun marketing in new ways to raise capital: replica kits, televised matches, sponsorship deals… before long running a football team was more about money than location.

And that’s where we are today, and why the odds are good that your local professional football team doesn’t have any players that you or anybody you know will ever meet in person.

That’s a bit of a long a way to say “nah, I’m not terribly into sports”, isn’t it?

Footnotes

1 I even go to efforts to filter sports news out of my RSS subscriptions!

2 The dog loves trying to join in a game of football and will happily push the ball up and down the pitch, but I don’t think she understands the rules and she’s indecisive about which team she’s on. Also, her passing game leaves a lot to be desired, and her dribbling invariably leaves the ball covered in drool.

3 And even then, my primary role in the team was to be a chunky dirty-fighter of a player who got in the way of the other team and wasn’t afraid to throw his weight around.

4 Unless it’s cricket. What the fuck is cricket supposed to be about? I have spectated a cricket match featuring people I know and I still don’t see the attraction.

5 Soccer certainly wasn’t the first sport to “go professional” in the UK; cricket was way ahead of it, for example. But it enjoys such worldwide popularity today that I think it’s a good example to use in a history lesson.

6 I’m not here to claim that everything that’s wrong with the commercialisation of professional football can be traced to the North/South divide in England.. but we can agree it’s a contributing factor, right?

7 Here’s a fun aside: this change to the rules about employment of professional players didn’t reach Scotland until 1893, and many excellent Scottish players – wanting to make a career of their hobby – moved to England in order to join English teams as professional players. In the 1890s, the majority of the players at Preston North End (whose stadium I lived right around the corner of for over a decade) were, I understand, Scottish!

8 And girls! Even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were women’s football teams: Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C., also from Preston (turns out there’s a reason the National Football Museum was, until 2012, located there), became famous for beating local men’s teams and went on to represent England internationally. But in 1921 the FA said that “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”, and banned from the leagues any men’s team that shared their pitch with a women’s team. The ban was only rescinded in 1971. Thanks, FA.

Dan, wearing a red t-shirt and in bright sunshine, pretends (badly) to be shouting excitedly. In the background, a group of people are watching a televised rugby match; one is wearing a South African flag as a cape.× Monochrome line drawing showing a 19th century scene of a football match. The ball appears to have been headed towards the goal by a jumping player; the goalkeeper is poised to dive for it.×