published on gemini

Magician Roles

Because I work somewhere hip enough to let people tweak their job titles, mine is “Code Magician”.

LinkedIn isn’t as hip as Automattic, though. That’s why they keep emailing me sector updates… for the “Magician” sector… 😅

I don’t want your data

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

The web loves data. Data about you. Data about who you are, about what you do, what you love doing, what you love eating.

…

I, on the other end, couldn’t care less about your data. I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content. I just don’t care.

…

Manuel Moreale

Manu speaks my mind. Among the many hacks I’ve made to this site, I actively try not to invade on your privacy by collecting analytics, and I try not to let others to so either!

My blog is for myself first and foremost (if you enjoy it too, that’s just a bonus). This leads to two conclusions:

If I’m the primary audience, I don’t need analytics (because I know who I am), and
I don’t want to be targeted by invasive analytics (and use browser extensions to block them, e.g. I by-default block all third-party scripts, delete cookies from non-allowlisted domains 15 seconds after navigating away from sites, etc.); so I’d prefer them not to be on a site for which I’m the primary audience!

I’ve gone into more detail about this on my privacy page and hinted at it on my colophon. But I don’t know if anybody ever reads either of those pages, of course!

FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, Punk Rock Edition

A Birmingham-based punky trio, Luxury Nan Smell, have released an EP called (Derogatory). The first track on that album? freedeedpoll.org.uk. Named in reference to my website of the same name.

Naturally, I was delighted, not least because it gives me an excuse to use the “deed poll” and “music” tags simultaneously on a post for the first time.

Don’t ask me what my “real” name is,
I’ve already told you what it was,
And I’m planning on burning my birth certificate.

The song’s about discovering and asserting self-identity through an assumed, rather than given, name. Which is fucking awesome.

Screenshot showing freedeedpoll.org.uk — The website’s basically unchanged for most of a decade and a half, and… umm… it looks it. I really ought to get around to improving and enhancing it someday.

Like virtually all of my sites, including this one, freedeedpoll.org.uk deliberately retains minimal logs and has no analytics tools. As a result, I have very little concept of how popular it is, how widely it’s used etc., except when people reach out to me.

People do: I get a few emails every month from people who’ve got questions¹, or who are having trouble getting their homemade deed poll accepted by troublesome banks. I’m happy to help them, but without additional context, I can’t be sure whether these folks represent the entirety of the site’s users, a tiny fraction, or somewhere in-between.

So it’s obviously going to be a special surprise for me to have my website featured in a song.

Screengrab from a video in which a vlogger holds up their freedeedpoll.org.uk deed poll. — Out of curiosity, I searched around for a bit and discovered a surprising amount of chatter about my site on social media, like this charming guy who talked about his experience of changing his name.

I’ve been having a challenging couple of weeks², and it was hugely uplifting for me to bump into these appreciative references to my work in the wider Internet.

Footnotes

¹ Common questions I receive are about legal gender recognition, about changing the names of children, about changing one’s name while still a minor without parental consent, or about citizenship requirements. I’ve learned a lot about some fascinating bits of law.

² I’ve been struggling with a combination of the usual challenges at this time of year and a lack of self-care and also a handful of bonus household stresses: everything seems to be breaking all at once!

The Frosted Pane

Pagan Wanderer Lu‘s new album Planets In The Wires dropped today, and I just cried my eyes out at track 5 (The Frosted Pane).

It opens almost apologetically, like an explanation for the gap in new releases for most of the twenty-teens. But it quickly becomes a poetic exploration of a detached depression of a man trapped under the weight of the world. It’s sad, and beautiful, and relatable.

It Takes Two

Lately, Ruth and I have been learning to dance Argentine Tango.

In a church hall, its walls decorated with colourful cloths, Dan and Ruth stand in a large circle of people, watching a man and a woman preparing to demonstrate some tango steps. — Stand with both feet together on the floor? Sure, I can do that one.

Let me tell you everything I know about tango¹:

It takes two to tango.
I am not very good at tango.

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt and holding a glass of wine, looks sceptically at the camera as he stands in front of a television screen showing a couple dancing, with the title frame "La Caminata: Introduction to Walking in Tango (Core Steps)". — Our lessons started online, in our own living room, with videos from Tango Stream‘s “Tango Basics” series. It was a really good introduction and I’d recommend it, but it’s no substitute for practice!

This adventure began, in theory at least, on my birthday in January. I’ve long expressed an interest in taking a dance class together, and so when Ruth pitched me a few options for a birthday gift, I jumped on the opportunity to learn tango. My knowledge of the dance was basically limited to what I’d seen in films and television, but it had always looked like such an amazing dance: careful, controlled… synchronised, sexy.

After shopping around for a bit, Ruth decided that the best approach was for us to do a “beginners” video course in the comfort of our living room, and then take a weekend getaway to do an “improvers” class.

After all, we’d definitely have time to complete the beginners’ course and get a lot of practice in before we had to take to the dance floor with a group of other “improvers”, right?²

Dan and Ruth sat on opposite sides of a table on a train, with darkness outside the window behind, raising tumbler glasses full of prosecco and smiling. — By the time we were riding the train up to Edinburgh, we’d watched all the videos in our beginners’ course, and tried all of the steps in isolation… but we’d had barely any opportunity to combine them into an actual *dance*.

Okay, let me try again to enumerate you everything I actually know about tango³:

Essentials. A leader and follower⁴ hold one another’s upper torso closely enough that, with practice, each can intuit from body position where the other’s feet are without looking. While learning, you will not manage to do this, and you will tread on one another’s toes.
The embrace. In the embrace, one side – usually the leader’s left – is “open”, with the dancers’ hands held; the other side is “closed”, with the dancers holding one another’s bodies. Generally, you should be looking at one another or towards the open side. But stop looking at your feet: you should know where your own feet are by proprioception, and you know where your partners’ feet are by guesswork and prayer.
The walk. You walk together, (usually) with opposite feet moving in-sync so that you can be close and not tread on one another’s toes, typically forward (from the leader’s perspective) but sometimes sideways or even backwards (though not usually for long, because it increases the already-inevitable chance that you’ll collide embarrassingly with other couples).
Movement. Through ~~magic and telepathy~~ a good connection with one another, the pair will, under the leader’s direction, open opportunities to perform more advanced (but still apparently beginner-level) steps and therefore entirely new ways to mess things up. These steps include:
- Forward ochos. The follower stepping through a figure-eight (ocho) on the closed side, or possibly the open side, but they probably forget which way they were supposed to turn when they get there, come out on the wrong foot, and treat on the leader’s toes.
- Backwards ochos. The follower moves from side to side or in reverse through a series of ochos, until the leader gets confused which way they’re supposed to pivot to end the maneuver and both people become completely confused and unstuck.
- The cross. The leader walks alongside the follower, and when the leader steps back the follower chooses to assume that the leader intended for them to cross their legs, which opens the gateway to many other steps. If the follower guesses incorrectly, they probably fall over during that step. If the follower guesses correctly but forgets which way around their feet ought to be, they probably fall over on the very next step. Either way, the leader gets confused and does the wrong thing next.
- Giros. One or both partners perform a forwards step, then a sideways step, then a backwards step, then another sideways step, starting on the inside leg and pivoting up to 270° with each step such that the entire move rotates them some portion of a complete circle. In-sync with one another, of course.
- Sacadas. Because none of the above are hard enough to get right together, you should start putting your leg out between your partner’s leg and try and trip them up as they go. They ought to know you’re going to do this, because they’ve got perfect predictive capabilities about where your feet are going to end, remember? Also remember to use the correct leg, which might not be the one you expect, or you’ll make a mess of the step you’ll be doing in three beats’ time. Good luck!
- Barridas and mordidas. What, you finished the beginners’ course? Too smart to get tripped up by your partner’s sacada any more? Well now it’s time to start kicking your partner’s feet out from directly underneath them. That’ll show ’em.
Style. All of the above should be done gracefully, elegantly, with perfect synchronicity and in time with the music… oh, and did I mention you should be able to improve the whole thing on the fly, without pre-communication with your partner. 😅

Photograph of a small laminated instruction sheet on a golden tablecloth. Titled "Norteña Tango", it reads: Let's make this an amazing weekend. We are all here to dance, so let's look around us and try to make sure that everyone is dancing. We'd love it if you would follow the lines of dance by moving around the floor steadily, try using the cabeceo, leave space between you and the couple in front, make use of the corners of the dance floor, stay in the same lane where possible, take care when entering the dance floor, clear the floor and change partners during the cortinas. It would be great if you could avoid overtaking other couples on the floor, walking (other than when dancing) on the floor. — Just when you think you’ve worked out the basic rules of tango, you find a leaflet on your table with some rules of the dancefloor to learn, too!

Ultimately, it was entirely our own fault we felt out-of-our-depth up in Edinburgh at the weekend. We tried to run before we could walk, or – to put it another way – to milonga before we could caminar.

A somewhat-rushed video course and a little practice on carpet in your living room is not a substitute for a more-thorough práctica on a proper-sized dance floor, no matter how often you and your partner use any excuse of coming together (in the kitchen, in an elevator, etc.) to embrace and walk a couple of steps! Getting a hang of the fluid connections and movement of tango requires time, and practice, and discipline.

Photograph of paving slabs: a glyph of a walking person, signifying "walk here", has been painted onto the flagstones, but the stones have since been lifted and replaced in slightly different locations, making the person appear "scrambled". — Got the feeling that your body and your feet aren’t moving in the same direction? That’s tango!

But, not least because of our inexperience, we did learn a lot during our weekend’s deep-dive. We got to watch (and, briefly, partner with) some much better dancers and learned some advanced lessons that we’ll doubtless reflect back upon when we’re at the point of being ready for them. Because yes: we are continuing! Our next step is a Zoom-based lesson, and then we’re going to try to find a more-local group.

Also, we enjoyed the benefits of some one-on-one time with Jenny and Ricardo, the amazingly friendly and supportive teachers whose video course got us started and whose in-person event made us feel out of our depth (again: entirely our own fault).

If you’ve any interest whatsoever in learning to dance tango, I can wholeheartedly recommend Ricardo and Jenny Oria as teachers. They run courses in Edinburgh and occasionally elsewhere in the UK as well as providing online resources, and they’re the most amazingly supportive, friendly, and approachable pair imaginable!

Just… learn from my mistake and start with a beginner course if you’re a beginner, okay? 😬

Footnotes

¹ I’m exaggerating how little I know for effect. But it might not be as much of an exaggeration as you’d hope.

² We did not.

³ Still with a hint of sarcasm, though.

⁴ Tango’s progressive enough that it’s come to reject describing the roles in binary gendered terms, using “leader” and “follower” in place of what was once described as “man” and “woman”, respectively. This is great for improving access to pairs of dancers who don’t consist of a man and a woman, as well as those who simply don’t want to take dance roles imposed by their gender.

Household Finances Revisited

Almost a decade ago I shared a process that my domestic polyfamily and I had been using (by then, for around four years) to manage our household finances. That post isn’t really accurate any more, so it’s time for an update (there’s a link if you just want the updated spreadsheet):

Dan, wearing a WordPress Pride "rainbow flag on black" t-shirt, sits on a park bench alongside a French Bulldog (with her tongue sticking out) and a young boy (throwing a peace sign, wearing a pink cycle helmet and a blue school uniform). — Our household costs have increased considerably over the last decade, not least because children and pets are *expensive* (who knew?).

Sample data

For my examples below, assume a three-person family. I’m using unrealistic numbers for easy arithmetic.

Alice earns £2,000, Bob earns £1,000, and Chris earns £500, for a total household income of £3,500.
Alice spends £1,450, Bob £800, and Chris £250, for a total household expenditure of £2,500.

Model #1: Straight Split

We’ve never done things this way, but for completeness sake I’ll mention it: the simplest way that households can split their costs is by dividing them between the participants equally: if the family make a £60 shopping trip, £20 should be paid by each of Alice, Bob, and Chris.

My example above shows exactly why this might not be a smart choice: this model would have each participant contribute £833.33 over the course of the month, which is more than Chris earned. If this month is representative, then Chris will gradually burn through their savings and go broke, while Alice will put over a grand into her savings account every month!

Photograph of the Statue of Lenin in Independence Square, Minsk: Government House #1 stands behind a large metal statue of Vladimir Lenin, looking to his right. — “Land, Bread, Peace… and Spreadsheets!”

Model #2: Income-Assessed

We’re a bunch of leftie socialist types, and wanted to reflect our political outlook in our household finances, too. So rather than just splitting our costs equally between us, we initially implemented a means-assessment system based on the relative differences between our incomes. The thinking was that somebody that earns twice as much should contribute twice as much towards the costs of running the household.

Using our example family above, here’s how that might look:

Alice earned 57% of the household income, so she should have contributed 57% of the household costs: £1,425. She overpaid by £25.
Bob earned 29% of the household income, so he should have contributed 29% of the household costs: £725. He overpaid by £75.
Chris earned 14% of the household income, so they should have contributed 14% of the household costs: £350. They underpaid by £100.
Therefore, at the end of the month Chris should settle up by giving £25 to Alice and £75 to Bob.

By analogy: The “Income-Assessed” model is functionally equivalent to splitting each and every expense according to the participants income – e.g. if a £100 bill landed on their doormat, Alice would pay £57, Bob £29, and Chris £14 of it – but has the convenience that everybody just pays for things “as they go along” and then square everything up when their paycheques come in.

Photograph showing a detached white house clad in scaffolding, under a clear blue sky. — You know what else is surprisingly expensive? Having the roof of your house taken off.

Over time, our expenditures grew and changed and our incomes grew, but they didn’t do so in an entirely simple fashion, and we needed to make some tweaks to our income-assessed model of household finance contributions. For example:

Gross vs Net Income: For a while, some of our incomes were split into a mixture of employed income (on which income tax was paid as-we-earned) and self-employed income (for which income tax would be calculated later), making things challenging. We agreed that net income (i.e. take-home pay) was the correct measure for us to use for the income-based part of the calculation, which also helped keep things fair as some of us began to cross into and out of the higher earner tax bracket.
Personal Threshold: At times, a subset of us earned a disproportionate portion of the household income (there were short periods where one of us earned over 50% of the household income; at several other times two family members each earned thrice that of the third). Our costs increased too, but this imposed an regressive burden on the lower-earner(s), for whom those costs represented a greater proportion of their total income. To attempt to mitigate this, we introduced a personal threshold somewhat analogous to the income tax “personal allowance” (the policy that means that you don’t pay tax on your first £12,570 of income).

Eventually, we came to see that what we were doing was trying to patch a partially-broken system, and tried something new!

Model #3: Same-Residual

In 2022, we transitioned to a same-residual system that attempts to share out out money in an even-more egalitarian way. Instead of each person contributing in accordance with their income, the model attempts to leave each person with the same average amount of disposable personal income at the end. The difference is most-profound where the relative incomes are most-diverse.

With the example family above, that would mean:

The household earned £3,500 and spent £2,500, leaving £1,000. Dividing by 3 tells us that each person should have £333.33 after settling up.
Alice earned earned £2,000 and spent £1,450, so she has £550 left. That’s £216.67 too much.
Bob earned earned £1,000 and spent £800, so she has £200 left. That’s £133.33 too little.
Chris earned earned £500 and spent £250, so she has £250 left. That’s £83.33 too little.
Therefore, at the end of the month Alice should settle up by giving £133.33 to Bob and £83.33 to Chris (note there’s a 1p rounding error).

That’s a very different result than the Income-Assessed calculation came up with for the same family! Instead of Chris giving money to Alice and Bob, because those two contributed to household costs disproportionately highly for their relative incomes, Alice gives money to Bob and Chris, because their incomes (and expenditures) were much lower. Ignoring any non-household costs, all three would expect to have the same bank balance at the start of the month as at the end, after settlement.

By analogy: The “Same-Residual” model is functionally equivalent to having everybody’s salary paid into a shared bank account, out of which all household expenditures are paid, and at the end of the month everything that’s left in the bank account gets split equally between the participants.

Screenshot showing a sample filled verison of the spreadsheet. — Our version of the spreadsheet has inherited a lot of hacky edges, many for now-unused functionality.

We’ve made tweaks to this model, too, of course. For example: we’ve set a “target” residual and, where we spend little enough in a month that we would each be eligible for more than that, we instead sweep the excess into our family savings account. It’s a nice approach to help build up a savings reserve without feeling a pinch.

I’m sure our model will continue to evolve, as it has for the last decade and a half, but for now it seems stable, fair, and reasonable. Maybe it’ll work for your household too (whether or not you’re also a polyamorous family!): take a look at the spreadsheet in Google Drive and give it a go.

Pen Pals Wanted

Semi-inspired by a similar project by Kev Quirk, I’ve got a project I want to run on my blog in 2024.

I want you to be my pen pal for a month. Get in touch by emailing penpals@danq.me or any other way you like and let’s do this!

Traditional inkwell and pen, the latter held in an inkstained finger grip, being used to write a letter on unbleached paper atop a wooden desk. — We’ll use email, though, not paper.

I don’t know much about the people who read my blog, whether they’re ad-hoc visitors or regular followers¹.

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, sits hunched over a keyboard with Pride-coloured keys, looking thoughtfully at a widescreen monitor. On the monitor is a mocked-up screenshot showing site analytics for DanQ.me, but with question marks for every datapoint. — I’m not interested in collecting statistics about people reading this post. I’m interested in meeting them.

So here’s the plan: I’m looking to do is to fill a “dance card” of interesting people each of with whom I’ll “pen pal” for a month.

The following month, I’ll blog about the experience: who I met, what I learned about them, what I learned about myself. Have a look below and see if there’s a slot for you: I’d love to chat to you about, well – anything!

My goals:

- Get inspired to blog about new/different things (and hopefully help inspire others to do the same).
- Connect with a dozen folks on a more-interpersonal level than I normally do via my blog.

Maybe even make, or deepen, some friendships!

The “rules”:

Aiming for at least 3 email exchanges over a month. Maybe more.²
Email is the medium.³
There’s no specific agenda: I promise to bring what I’ve been thinking about and working on, and possibly a spicy conversation-starter from LetsLifeChat.com. You bring whatever you like. No topic is explicitly off the table unless somebody says it is (which anybody can do at any time, for any or no reason).
I’ll blog a summary of my experience the month afterwards, but I won’t share anything without permission. I’ll happily share an unpublished draft with each penpal first so they can veto any bits they don’t like. I’ll refer to you by whatever name, link etc. suits you best.
If you have a blog/digital garden/social presence of any kind, you’re welcome to blog about it too. Or not: entirely up to you!

Who’s in so far?

~~Want in? Leave a comment, at-me on the Fediverse @dan@danq.me, fill my contact form, or just email penpals@danq.me.~~ Okay; looks like I’ve got a full year of people to meet! Awesome!

Penpal with…	…during…	…and blog in:	Notes:
Colin Walker	December 2023	January 2024	Colin’s announcement
Thom Denholm	January 2024	February 2024
Ru	February 2024	March 2024
Dr. Alex Bowyer	March 2024	April 2024	Agreement via LinkedIn
Roslyn Cook	April 2024	May 2024
Garrett Coakley	May 2024	June 2024
Derek Kedziora	June 2024	July 2024
Aarón Fas	July 2024	August 2024
Cal Desmond-Pearson	August 2024	September 2024
Tyoma	September 2024	October 2024
Farai	October 2024	November 2024
Katie	November 2024	December 2024	Katie’s comment

I’ll update this table as people get in touch.

Who do I want to meet?

You! If you’re reading this, you’re probably somebody I want to meet! But I’d be especially interested in penpalling with people who tick one or more of the following boxes:

Personal bloggers at the edges of or just outside my usual social circles. Maybe you’re an IndieWeb, RSS Club, or Geminispace explorer?
Regular readers, whether you just skim the post titles and dive in once in a blue moon or read every post and comment on the things you care about.
Automatticians from parts of the company I don’t get to interact with. Let’s build some bridges!
People whose interests overlap with mine in any way, large or small. That overlap might be technology (web standards, accessibility, security, blogging, open source…), hobbies (GPS sports, board games, magic, murder mysteries, science fiction, getting lost on Wikipedia…), volunteering (third sector support, tech for good, diversity in tech…), social (queer issues, polyamory, socialism…), or something else entirely.
Missed connections. Did we meet briefly or in-passing (conferences, meetups, friends-of-friends, overlapping volunteering circles) but not develop anything further? I’d love to pick up where we left off!
Distant- and nearly-friends. Did we drift apart long ago, or never quite move into one another’s orbit in the first place? This could be your excuse to touch bases!

If you read this far and didn’t email penpals@danq.me yet, go do that. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Footnotes

¹ Not-knowing who reads my blog might come at least in part from the fact that I actively sabotage any plugin that might give me any analytics! One might say I’ve shot myself in the foot, there.

² If we stay in touch afterwards that’s fine too, but it’s not essential.

³ I’m looking for longer-form, but slower, communication than you get via e.g. instant messengers and whatnot: a more “penpal” experience.

Gemini Squared

How did I never think of accessing Gemini (the protocol) on my Gemini (portable computer) before today?

Of course, I recently rehomed my Gemini so instead I had to access Gemini on my Cosmo (Gemini’s successor), which isn’t nearly as cool.¹

Footnotes

¹ Still pretty cool though. Reminds me of using Lynx on my Psion 5mx last millenium…

Gemini and Spartan without a browser

A particular joy of the Gemini and Spartan protocols – and the Markdown-like syntax of Gemtext – is their simplicity.

Even without a browser, you can usually use everyday command-line tools that you might have installed already to access relatively human-readable content.

Here are a few different command-line options that should show you a copy of this blog post (made available via CapsulePress, of course):

Gemini

Gemini communicates over a TLS-encrypted channel (like HTTPS), so we need a to use a tool that speaks the language. Luckily: unless you’re on Windows you’ve probably got one installed already¹.

Using OpenSSL

This command takes the full gemini:// URL you’re looking for and the domain name it’s at. 1965 refers to the port number on which Gemini typically runs –

printf "gemini://danq.me/posts/gemini-without-a-browser\r\n" | \
  openssl s_client -ign_eof -connect danq.me:1965

Using GnuTLS

GnuTLS closes the connection when STDIN closes, so we use cat to keep it open. Note inclusion of --no-ca-verification to allow self-signed certificates (optionally add --tofu for trust-on-first-use support, per the spec).

{ printf "gemini://danq.me/posts/gemini-without-a-browser\r\n"; cat -; } | \
  gnutls-cli --no-ca-verification danq.me:1965

Using Ncat

Netcat reimplementation Ncat makes Gemini requests easy:

printf "gemini://danq.me/posts/gemini-without-a-browser\r\n" | \
  ncat --ssl danq.me 1965

Spartan

Spartan is a little like “Gemini without TLS“, but it sports an even-more-lightweight request format which makes it especially easy to fudge requests².

Using Telnet

Note the use of cat to keep the connection open long enough to get a response, as we did for Gemini over GnuTLS.

{ printf "danq.me /posts/gemini-without-a-browser 0\r\n"; cat -; } | \
  telnet danq.me 300

Using cURL

cURL supports the telnet protocol too, which means that it can be easily coerced into talking Spartan:

printf "danq.me /posts/gemini-without-a-browser 0\r\n" | \
  curl telnet://danq.me:300

Using Ncat/Netcat

Because TLS support isn’t needed, this also works perfectly well with Netcat – just substitute nc/netcat or whatever your platform calls it in place of ncat:

printf "danq.me /posts/gemini-without-a-browser 0\r\n" | \
  ncat danq.me 300

I hope these examples are useful to somebody debugging their capsule, someday.

Footnotes

¹ You can still install one on Windows, of course, it’s just less-likely that your operating system came with such a command-line tool built-in

² Note that the domain and path are separated in a Spartan request and followed by the size of the request payload body: zero in all of my examples

Making WordPress Fast (The Hard Way)

This isn’t the guide for you

The Internet is full of guides on easily making your WordPress installation run fast. If you’re looking to speed up your WordPress site, you should go read those, not this.

Those guides often boil down to the same old tips:

uninstall unnecessary plugins,
optimise caching (both on the server and, via your headers, on clients/proxies),
resize your images properly and/or ensure WordPress is doing this for you,
use a CDN (and use DNS prefetch hints)¹,
tune your PHP installation so it’s got enough memory, keeps a process alive, etc.,
ensure your server is minifying² and compressing files, and
run it on a faster server/behind a faster connection³

You’ve heard those tips before, right? Today, let’s try something different.

The hard way

This article is for people who aren’t afraid to go tinkering in their WordPress codebase to squeeze a little extra (real world!) performance.

It’s for people whose neverending quest for perfection is already well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

But mostly, it’s for people who want to gawp at me, the freak who actually did this stuff just to make his personal blog a tiny bit nippier without spending an extra penny on hosting.

You shouldn’t use Lighthouse as your only measure of your site’s performance. But it’s still reassuring when you get to see those fireworks!

Don’t start with the hard way. Exhaust all the easy solutions – or at least, make a conscious effort which easy solutions to enact or reject – first. Only if you really want to get into the weeds should you actually try doing the things I propose here. They’re not for most sites, and they’re not the for faint of heart.

Performance is a tradeoff. Every performance improvement costs you something else: time, money, DX, UX, etc. What you choose to trade for performance gains depends on your priority of constituencies, which may differ from mine.⁴

This is not a recipe book. This won’t tell you what code to change or what commands to run. The right answers for your content will be different than the right answers for mine. Also: you shouldn’t change what you don’t understand! But I hope these tips will help you think about what questions you need to ask to make your site blazing fast.

Okay, let’s get started…

1. Backstab the plugins you can’t live without

If there are plugins you can’t remove because you depend upon their functionality, and those plugins inject content (especially JavaScript) on the front-end… backstab them to undermine that functionality.

For example, if you want Jetpack‘s backup and downtime monitoring features, but you don’t want it injecting random <link rel='stylesheet' id='...-jetpack-css' href='...' media='all' />‘s (an extra stylesheet to download and parse) into your pages: find the add_filter hook it uses and remove_filter it in your theme⁵.

Better yet, remove wp_head() from your theme entirely⁶. Now, instead of blocking the hooks you don’t want polluting your <head>, you’re specifically allowing only those you want. You’ll want to take care to get some semi-essential ones like <link rel="canonical" href="...">⁷.

Now most of your plugins are broken, but in exchange, your theme has reclaimed complete control over what gets sent to the user. You can select what content you actually want delivered, and deliver no more than that. It’s harder work for you, but your site becomes so much lighter.

Animated GIF from The Simpsons. Leonard Nimoy says "Well, my work is done here." Barney says "What do you mean? You didn't do anything?" Nimoy laughs and replies "Didn't I?" before disappearing as if transported away by a Star Trek teleporter. — Your site is faster now. It doesn’t work, but it’s quick about it!

2. Throw away 100% of your render-blocking JavaScript (and as much as you can of the rest)

The single biggest bottleneck to the user viewing a modern WordPress website is the JavaScript that needs to be downloaded, compiled, and executed before the page can be rendered. Most of that’s plugins, but even on a nearly-vanilla installation you might find a copy of jQuery (eww!) and some other files.

In step 1 you threw it all away, which is great… but I’m betting you were depending on some of that to make your site work? Let’s put it back, carefully and selectively, while minimising the impact on load time.

That means scripts should be loaded (a) low-down, and/or (b) marked defer (or, better yet, async), so they don’t block page rendering.

If you haven’t already, you might like to View Source on this page. Count my <script> tags. You’ll probably find just two of them: one external file marked async, and a second block right at the bottom.

The inline <script> in my footer.php wraps a single line of PHP: which looks a little like this: <?php echo implode("\n\n", apply_filters( 'danq_footer_js', [] ) ); ?>. For each item in an initially-empty array, it appends to the script tag. When I render anything that requires JavaScript, e.g. for 360° photography, I can just add to that (keyed, to prevent duplicates when viewing an archive page) array. Thus, the relevant script gets added exclusively to the pages where it’s needed, not to the entire site.

The only inline script added to every page loads my service worker, which itself aims to optimise caching as well as providing limited “offline” functionality.

While you’re tweaking your JavaScript anyway, you might like to check that any suitable addEventListeners are set to passive mode. Especially if you’re doing anything with touch or mousewheel events, you can often increase the perceived performance of these interactions by not letting your custom code block the default browser behaviour.

I promise you; most of your blog’s front-end JavaScript is either (a) garbage nobody wants, (b) polyfills for platforms nobody uses, or (c) huge libraries you’ve imported so you can use just one or two functions form them. Trash them.

3. Don’t use a CDN

Wait, what? That’s the opposite of what everybody else recommends. To understand why, you have to think about why people recommend a CDN in the first place. Their reasons are usually threefold:

Proximity
Claim: A CDN delivers content geographically-closer to the user.
Retort: Often true. But in step 4 we’re going to make sure that everything critical comes within the first TCP sliding window anyway, so there’s little benefit, and there’s a cost to that extra DNS lookup and fresh handshake. Edge caching your own content may have value, but for most sites it’ll have a much smaller impact than almost everything else on this list.
Precaching
Claim: A CDN improves the chance resources are precached in the user’s browser.
Retort: Possibly true, especially with fonts (although see step 6) but less than you’d think with JS libraries because there are so many different versions/hosts of each. Yours may well be the only site in the user’s circuit that uses a particular one!
Power
Claim: A CDN has more resources than you and so can better-withstand spikes of traffic.
Retort: Maybe, but they also introduce an additional single-point-of-failure. CDNs aren’t magically immune to downtime nor content-blocking, and if you depend on one you’ve just doubled the number of potential failure points that can make your site instantly useless. Furthermore: in exchange for those resources you’re trading away your users’ privacy and security: if a CDN gets hacked, every site that uses it gets hacked too.

Consider edge-caching your own content only if you think you need it, but ditch jsDeliver, cdnjs, Google Hosted Libraries etc.

Hell: if you can, ditch all JavaScript served from third-parties and slap a Content-Security-Policy: script-src 'self' header on your domain to dramatically reduce the entire attack surface of your site!⁸

4. Reduce your HTML and CSS size to <12kb compressed

There’s a magic number you need to know: 12kb. Because of some complicated but fascinating maths (and depending on how your hosting is configured), it can be significantly faster to initially load a web resource of up to 12kb than it is to load one of, say, 15kb. Also, for the same reason, loading a web resource of much less than 12kb might not be significantly faster than loading one only a little less than 12kb.

Exploit this by:

Making your pages as light as possible⁹, then
Inlining as much essential content as possible (CSS, SVGs, JavaScript etc.) to bring you back up to close-to that magic number again!

$ curl --compressed -so /dev/null -w "%{size_download}\n" https://danq.me/
              

              10416

Note that this is the compressed, over-the-wire size. Last I checked, my homepage weighed-in at about 10.4kb compressed, which includes the entirety of its HTML and CSS, most of its JS, and a couple of its SVG images.

Again, this probably flies in the face of everything you were taught about performance. I’m sure you were told that you should <link> to your stylesheets so that they can be cached across page loads. But it turns out that if you can make your HTML and CSS small enough, the opposite is true and you should inline the stylesheet again: caching styles becomes almost irrelevant if you get all the content in a single round-trip anyway!

For extra credit, consider optimising your homepage’s CSS so it’s even smaller by excluding directives that only apply to non-homepage pages, and vice-versa. Assuming you’re using a preprocessor, this shouldn’t be too hard: at simplest, you can have a homepage.css and main.css, each derived from a set of source files some of which they share (reset/normalisation, typography, colours, whatever) and the rest which is specific only to that part of the site.

Most web pages should fit entirely onto a floppy disk. This one doesn’t, mostly because of all the Simpsons clips, but most should.

Can’t manage to get your HTML and CSS down below the magic number? Then at least ensure that your HTML alone weighs in at <12kb compressed and you’ll still get some of the benefits. If you’ve got the headroom, you can selectively include a <style> block containing only the most-crucial CSS, with a particular focus on any that results in layout shifts (e.g. anything that specifies the height: of otherwise dynamically-sized block elements, or that declares an element position: absolute or position: fixed). These kinds of changes are relatively computationally-expensive because they cause content to re-flow, so provide hints as soon as possible so that the browser can accommodate for them.

5. Make the first load awesome

We don’t really talk about content being “above the fold” like we used to, because the modern Web has such a diverse array of screen sizes and resolutions that doing so doesn’t make much sense.

But if loading your full page is still going to take multiple HTTP requests (scripts, images, fonts, whatever), you should still try to deliver the maximum possible value in the first round-trip. That means:

Making sure all your textual content loads immediately! Unless you’re delivering a huge amount of text, there’s absolutely no excuse for lazy-loading text: it’s usually tiny, compresses well, and it’s fast to parse. It’s also the most-important content of most pages. Get it delivered to the browser so it can be rendered rightaway.
Lazy-loading images that are “expected” to be below the fold, using the proper HTML mechanism for this (never a JavaScript approach).
Reserving space for blocks by sizing images appropriately, e.g. using <img width="..." height="..." ...> or having them load as a background with background-size: cover or contain in a block sized with CSS delivered in the initial payload. This reduces layout shift, which mitigates the need for computationally-expensive content reflows.
If possible (see point 4), move vector images that support basic site functionality, like logos, inline. This might also apply to icons, if they’re “as important” as text content.
Marking everything up with standard semantic HTML. There’s a trend for component-driven design to go much too far, resulting in JavaScript components being used in place of standard elements like links, buttons, and images, resulting in highly-fragile websites: when those scripts fail (or are very slow to load), the page becomes unusable.

6. Reduce your dependence on downloaded fonts

Fonts are lovely and can be an important part of your brand identity, but they can also add a lot of weight to your web pages.

If you’re ready and able to drop your webfonts and appreciate the beauty and flexibility of a system font stack (I get it: I’m not there quite yet!), you can at least make smarter use of your fonts:

Every modern browser supports WOFF2, so you can ditch those chunky old formats you’re clinging onto.
If you’re only using the Latin alphabet, minify your fonts further by dropping the characters you don’t need: tools like Google Webfonts Helper can help with this, as well as making it easier to selfhost fonts from the most-popular library (is a smart idea for the reasons described under point 3, above!). There are tools available to further minify fonts if e.g. you only need the capital letters for your title font or something.
- - Browsers are pretty clever and will work-around it if you make a mistake. Didn’t include an emoji or some obscure mathematical symbol, and then accidentally used them in a post? Browsers will switch to a system font that can fill in the gap, for you.
Make the most-liberal use of the font-display: CSS directive that you can tolerate!
- Don’t use font-display: block, which is functionally the default in most browsers, unless you absolutely have to.
- font-display: fallback is good if you’re too cowardly/think your font is too important for you to try font-display: optional.
- font-display: optional is an excellent choice for body text: if the browser thinks it’s worthwhile to download the font (it might choose not to if the operating system indicates that it’s using a metered or low-bandwidth connection, for example), it’ll try to download it, but it won’t let doing so slow things down too much and it’ll fall-back to whatever backup (system) font you specify.
- font-display: swap is also worth considering: this will render any text immediately, even if the right font hasn’t downloaded yet, with no blocking time whatsoever, and then swap it for the right font when it appears. It’s probably better for headings, because large paragraphs of text can be a little disorienting if they change font while a user is looking at them!

If writing is for nerds, then typography must be doubly-so. But you’ve read this far, so I’m confident that you qualify…

7. Cache pre-compressed static files

It’s possible that by this point you’re saying “if I had to do this much work, I might as well just use a static site generator”. Well good news: that’s what you’re about to do!

Obviously you should make sure all your regular caching improvements (appropriate HTTP headers for caching, a service worker that further improves on that logic based on your content’s update schedule, etc.) first. Again: everything in this guide presupposes that you’ve already done the things that normal people do.

By aggressively caching pre-compressed copies of all your pages, you’re effectively getting the best of both worlds: a website that, for anonymous visitors, is served directly from .html.gz files on a hard disk or even straight from RAM in memcached¹⁰, but which still maintains all the necessary server-side interactivity to allow it to be used as a conventional Web-based CMS (including accepting comments if that’s your jam).

WP Super Cache can do the heavy lifting for you for a filesystem-based solution so long as you put it into “Expert” mode and amending your webserver configuration. I’m using Nginx, so I needed a try_files directive like this:

location / {
try_files /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$wp_super_cache_path/index-https.html $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

8. Optimise image formats

I’m sure your favourite performance testing tool has already complained at you about your failure to use the best formats possible when serving images to your users. But how can you fix it?

There are some great plugins for improving your images automatically and/or in bulk – I use EWWW Image Optimizer – but to really make the most of them you’ll want to reconfigure your webserver to detect clients that Accept: image/webp and attempt to dynamically serve them .webp variants, for example. Or if you’re ready to give up on legacy formats and replace all your .pngs with .webps, that’s probably fine too!

Image containing the text — The image you see at `https://danq.me/_q23u/2023/11/dynamic.png` is *probably* an `image/webp`. But if your browser doesn’t support WebP, you’ll get an `image/png` instead!

Assuming you’ve got curl and Imagemagick‘s identify, you can see this in action:

curl -s https://danq.me/_q23u/2023/11/dynamic.png -H "Accept: image/webp" | identify -
(Will give you a WebP image)
curl -s https://danq.me/_q23u/2023/11/dynamic.png -H "Accept: image/png" | identify -
(Will give you a PNG image, even though the URL is the same)

9. Simplify, simplify, simplify

The single biggest impact you can have upon the performance of your WordPress pages is to make them less complex.

I’m not necessarily saying that everybody should follow in my lead and co-publish their WordPress sites on the Gemini protocol. But you’ve got to admit: the simplicity of the Gemini protocol and the associated Gemtext format makes both lightning fast.

Writing my templates and posts so that they’re compatible with CapsulePress helps keep my code necessarily-simple. You don’t have to do that, though, but you should be asking yourself:

Does my DOM need to cascade so deeply? Could I achieve the same with less?
Am I pre-emptively creating content, e.g. adding a hidden <dialog> directly to the markup in the anticipation that it might be triggered later using JavaScript, rather than having that JavaScript run document.createElement the element after the page becomes readable?
Have I created unnecessarily-long chains of CSS selectors¹¹ when what I really want is a simple class name, or perhaps even a semantic element name?

10. Add a Service Worker

A service worker isn’t magic. In particular, it can’t help you with those new visitors hitting your site for the first time¹².

A service worker lets you do smart things on behalf of the user’s network connection, so that by the time they ask for a resource, you already fetched it for them.

But a suitable service worker can do a few things that can help with performance. In particular, you might consider:

Precaching assets that you anticipate they’re likely to need (e.g. if you use different stylesheets for the homepage and other pages, you can preload both so no matter where a user lands they’ve already got the CSS they’ll need for the entire site).
Preloading popular pages like the homepage and recent articles, allowing them to load quickly.
Caching a fallback pages – and other resources as-they’re-accessed – to support a full experience for users even if they (or your site!) disconnect from the Internet (or even embedding “save for offline” functionality!).

Chapters 7 and 8 of Going Offline by Jeremy Keith are especially good for explaining how this can be achieved, and it’s all much easier than everything else I just described.

Anything else?

Did I miss anything? If you’ve got a tip about ramping up WordPress performance that isn’t one of the “typical seven” – probably because it’s too hard to be worthwhile for most people – I’d love to hear it!

Footnotes

¹ You’ll sometimes see guides that suggest that using a CDN is to be recommended specifically because it splits your assets among multiple domains/subdomains, which mitigates browsers’ limitation on the number of files they can download simultaneously. This is terrible advice, because such limitations essentially don’t exist any more, but DNS lookups and TLS handshakes still have a bandwidth and computational cost. There are good things about CDNs, sometimes, but this has not been one of them for some time now.

² I’m not sure why guides keep stressing the importance of minifying code, because by the time you’re compressing them too it’s almost pointless. I guess it’s helpful if your compression fails?

³ “Use a faster server” is a “just throw money/the environment at it” solution. I’d like to think we can do better.

⁴ For my personal blog, I choose to prioritise user experience, privacy, accessibility, resilience, and standards compliance above almost everything else.

⁵ If you prefer to keep your backstab code separate, you can put it in a custom plugin, but you might find that you have to name it something late in the alphabet – I’ve previously used names like zzz-danq-anti-plugin-hacks – to ensure that they load after the plugins whose functionality you intend to unhook: broadly-speaking, WordPress loads plugins in alphabetical order.

⁶ I’ve assumed you’re using a classic, not block, theme. If you’re using a block theme, you get a whole different set of performance challenges to think about. Don’t get me wrong: I love block themes and think they’re a great way to put more people in control of their site’s design! But if you’re at the point where you’re comfortable digging this deep into your site’s PHP code, you probably don’t need that feature anyway, right?

⁷ WordPress is really good at serving functionally-duplicate content, so search engines appreciate it if you declare a proper canonical URL.

⁸ Before you choose to block all third-party JavaScript, you might have to whitelist Google Analytics if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind selling their visitor data to the world’s biggest harvester of personal information in exchange for some pretty graphs. I’m not that kind of person.

⁹ You were looking to join me in 512kb club anyway, right?

¹⁰ I’ve experimented with mounting a ramdisk and storing the WP Super Cache directory there, but it didn’t make a huge difference, probably because my files are so small that the parse/render time on the browser side dominates the total cascade, and they’re already being served from an SSD. I imagine in my case memcached would provide similarly-small benefits.

¹¹ I really love the power of CSS preprocessors like Sass, but they do make it deceptively easy to create many more – and longer – selectors than you intended in your final compiled stylesheet.

¹² Tools like Lighthouse usually simulate first-time visitors, which can be a little unfair to sites with great performance for established visitors. But everybody is a first-time visitor at least once (and probably more times, as caches expire or are cleared), so they’re still a metric you should consider.

Incredible Doom

I just finished reading Incredible Doom volumes 1 and 2, by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden, and man… that was a heartwarming and nostalgic tale!

Set in the early-to-mid-1990s world in which the BBS is still alive and kicking, and the Internet’s gaining traction but still lacks the “killer app” that will someday be the Web (which is still new and not widely-available), the story follows a handful of teenagers trying to find their place in the world. Meeting one another in the 90s explosion of cyberspace, they find online communities that provide connections that they’re unable to make out in meatspace.

A "Geek Code Block", printed in a dot-matrix style font, light-blue on black, reads: GU D-- -P+ C+L? U E M+ S-/+ N--- H-- F--(+) !G W++ T R? X? — I loved some of the contemporary nerdy references, like the fact that each chapter page sports the “Geek Code” of the character upon which that chapter focusses.¹

So yeah: the whole thing feels like a trip back into the naivety of the online world of the last millenium, where small, disparate (and often local) communities flourished and early netiquette found its feet. Reading Incredible Doom provides the same kind of nostalgia as, say, an afternoon spent on textfiles.com. But it’s got more than that, too.

Partial scan from a page of Incredible Doom, showing a character typing about "needing a solution", with fragments of an IRC chat room visible in background panels. — The user interfaces of IRC, Pine, ASCII-art-laden BBS menus etc. are all produced with a good eye for accuracy, but don’t be fooled: this is a story about humans, not computers. My 9-year-old loved it too, and she’s never even heard of IRC (I hope!).

It touches on experiences of 90s cyberspace that, for many of us, were very definitely real. And while my online “scene” at around the time that the story is set might have been different from that of the protagonists, there’s enough of an overlap that it felt startlingly real and believable. The online world in which I – like the characters in the story – hung out… but which occupied a strange limbo-space: both anonymous and separate from the real world but also interpersonal and authentic; a frontier in which we were still working out the rules but within which we still found common bonds and ideals.

A humorous comic scene from Incredible Doom in which a male character wearing glasses walks with a female character he's recently met and is somewhat intimidated by, playing-out in his mind the possibility that she might be about to stab him. Or kiss him. Or kiss him THEN stab him. — Having had times in the 90s that I met up offline with relative strangers whom I first met online, I can confirm that… yeah, the fear is real!

Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying that Incredible Doom is a lot of fun and if it sounds like your cup of tea, you should read it.

Also: shortly after putting the second volume down, I ended up updating my Geek Code for the first time in… ooh, well over a decade. The standards have moved on a little (not entirely in a good way, I feel; also they’ve diverged somewhat), but here’s my attempt:

----- BEGIN GEEK CODE VERSION 6.0 -----
GCS^$/SS^/FS^>AT A++ B+:+:_:+:_ C-(--) D:+ CM+++ MW+++>++
ULD++ MC+ LRu+>++/js+/php+/sql+/bash/go/j/P/py-/!vb PGP++
G:Dan-Q E H+ PS++ PE++ TBG/FF+/RM+ RPG++ BK+>++ K!D/X+ R@ he/him!
----- END GEEK CODE VERSION 6.0 -----

Footnotes

¹ I was amazed to discover that I could still remember most of my Geek Code syntax and only had to look up a few components to refresh my memory.

Reading Rolled Papyri

One of my favourite parts of my former role at the Bodleian Libraries was getting to work on exhibitions. Not just because it was varied and interesting work, but because it let me get up-close to remarkable artifacts that most people never even get the chance to see.

Miniature model of an exhibition space, constructed using painted blocks and laid-out on the floor of an exhibition space. — We also got to play dollhouse, laying out exhibitions in miniature.

A personal favourite of mine are the Herculaneum Papyri. These charred scrolls were part of a private library near Pompeii that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Rediscovered from 1752, these ~1,800 scrolls were distributed to academic institutions around the world, with the majority residing in Naples’ Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III.

Under-construction exhibition including a highly-reflective suit worn by volcano field researchers. — The second time I was in an exhibition room with the Bodleian’s rolled-up Herculaneum Papyri was for an exhibition specifically about humanity’s relationship with volcanoes.

As you might expect of ancient scrolls that got buried, baked, and then left to rot, they’re pretty fragile. That didn’t stop Victorian era researchers trying a variety of techniques to gently unroll them and read what was inside.

Like many others, what I love about the Herculaneum Papyri is the air of mystery. Each could be anything from a lost religious text to, I don’t know, somebody’s to-do list (“buy milk, arrange for annual service of chariot, don’t forget to renew volcano insurance…”).¹

In recent years, we’ve tried “virtually unrolling” the scrolls using a variety of related technologies. And – slowly – we’re getting there.

X-ray tomography is amazing, but it’s hampered by the fact that the ink and paper have near-equivalent transparency to x-rays. Plus, all the other problems. But new techniques are helping to overcome them.

So imagine my delight when this week, for the first time ever, a complete word was extracted from one of the carbonised, still-rolled-up scrolls from Herculaneum. Something that would have seemed inconceivable to the historians who first discovered and catalogued the scrolls is now possible, thanks to their careful conservation over the years along with the steady advance of technology.

Computer-assisted photograph showing visible letters on a rolled scroll, with highlighting showing those that can be deciphered, forming a word. — The word appears to be “purple”: either πορφύ̣ρ̣ας̣ (a noun, similar to how we might say “pass the purple [pen]” or πορφυ̣ρ̣ᾶς̣: if we can decode more words around it then it which might become clear from the context.

Anyway, I thought that was exciting news so I wanted to share.

Footnotes

¹ For more-serious academic speculation about the potential value of the scrolls, Richard Carrier’s got you covered.

Absence/Presents

I’m probably not going to get you a Christmas present. You probably shouldn’t get me one either.

Dan, wearing an "elf costume" Christmas jumper, looks into the camera while cuddling a French Bulldog. The pair are sitting on a beige sofa. — All I need for Christmas is… a woolly jumper and a dog, apparently. (And I only need the latter if the goose doesn’t get delivered.)

If you’re one of my kids and you’ve decided that maybe my blog isn’t just “boring grown-up stuff” and have come by, then you’re one of the exceptions. Lucky you.

Children get Christmas gifts from me. But if you’re an adult, all you’re likely to get from me is a hug, a glass of wine, and more food than you can possibly eat in a single sitting.

Top-down view of a dining table set with a Christmas-themed tablecloth. The meal has concluded and the seats have been vacated, but large amounts of food - most of a turkey, half a nutloaf, lots of mashed potato, several sprouts, stuffing balls, and chestnuts, some roast potatoes and parsnips, an entire boat full of gravy, and almost a dozen Yorkshire puddings - are still set out. — Turns out the real meaning of Christmas was eating yourself into indigestion all along.

I’ve come to the conclusion – much later than my mother and my sisters, who were clearly ahead of the curve – that Christmas presents are for kids.

Maybe, once, Christmas presents were for adults too, but by now the Internet has broken gift-giving to the extent it’s almost certainly preferable for me and the adults in my life if they just, y’know, order the thing they want than hoping that I’ll pick it out for them. Especially as so many of us are at a point where we already have a plethora of “stuff”, and don’t want to add to it unnecessarily at a time of year when, frankly, we’ve got better things to spend our time and money on.

Dan, wearing a Princess Twilight Sparkle / Frank Herbert's Dune crossover fan art t-shirt, sits on a grey sofa in front of a lit Christmas tree, holding a glass of wine. At the other end of the sofa JTA, a white man with a thick beard and glasses, reads to a (tired-looking) young boy. All three are surrounded by books. — I’ll still be participating fully in my household‘s “book exchange” Christmas Eve tradition, though, because it’s awesome.

Birthdays are still open season, because they aren’t hampered by the immediate expectation of reciprocity that Christmas carries. And I reserve the right to buy groups of (or containing) adults gifts at Christmas. But individual adults aren’t getting one this year, and they certainly shouldn’t feel like they need to get me anything either.¹

I don’t know to what extent, if at all, Ruth and JTA will be following me in this idea, so if you’re somebody who might have expected a gift from or wanted to give a gift to one of them… you’re on your own; you work it out!

Here’s to a Merry Christmas full of presents for children, only!

Footnotes

¹ If you’ve already bought me a gift for Christmas this year… firstly, that’s way too organised: you know it’s only October, right? And secondly: my birthday’s only a couple of weeks later…

Monster Munch Sandwich

Experimenting with some unusual combinations in anticipation of International Crisp Sandwich Day.

This one’s Roast Beef Monster Munch on Farmhouse White.

(I hereby release the crisp sandwich photo into the public domain / CC0 license; your choice.)

Easy FoundryVTT Cloud Hosting

Foundry is a wonderful virtual tabletop tool well-suited to playing tabletop roleplaying games with your friends, no matter how far away they are. It compares very favourably to the market leader Roll20, once you get past some of the initial set-up challenges and a moderate learning curve.

You can run it on your own computer and let your friends “connect in” to it, so long as you’re able to reconfigure your router a little, but you’ll be limited by the speed of your home Internet connection and people won’t be able to drop in and e.g. tweak their character sheet except when you’ve specifically got the application running.

A generally better option is to host your Foundry server in the cloud. For most of its history, I’ve run mine on Fox, my NAS, but I’ve recently set one up on a more-conventional cloud virtual machine too. A couple of friends have asked me about how to set up their own, so here’s a quick guide:

Screenshot from Linode showing a server, "Foundry", running, with specs as described below. — I used Linode to spin up a server because I still had a stack of free credits following a recent project. The instructions will work on any cloud host where you can spin up a Debian 12 virtual machine, and can be adapted for other distributions of Linux.

You will need…

A Foundry license ($50 USD / £48 GBP, one-off payment¹)
A domain name for which you control the DNS records; you’ll need to point a domain, like “danq.me” (or a subdomain of it, e.g. “vtt.danq.me”), at an IP address you’ll get later by creating an “A” record: your domain name registrar can probably help with this – I mostly use Gandi and, ignoring my frustration with recent changes to their email services, I think they’re great
An account with a cloud hosting provider: this example uses Linode but you can adapt for any of them
A basic level of comfort with the command-line

1. Spin up a server

Getting a virtual server is really easy nowadays.

You’ll need:

The operating system to be Debian 12 (or else you’ll need to adapt the instructions below)
The location to be somewhere convenient for your players: pick a server location that’s relatively-local to the majority of them to optimise for connection speeds
Approximately 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM, per Foundry’s recommended server specifications
An absolute minimum of 1GB of storage space, I’d recommend plenty more: The Levellers’ campaign currently uses about 10GB for all of its various maps, art, videos, and game data, so give yourself some breathing room (space is pretty cheap) – I’ve gone with 80GB for this example, because that’s what comes as standard with the 2 CPU/4GB RAM server that Linode offer

Choose a root password when you set up your server. If you’re a confident SSH user, add your public key so you can log in easily (and then disable password authentication entirely!).

For laziness, this guide has you run Foundry as root on your new server. Ensure you understand the implications of this.²

2. Point your (sub)domain at it

DNS propogation can be pretty fast, but… sometimes it isn’t. So get this step underway before you need it.

Your newly-created server will have an IP address, and you’ll be told what it is. Put that IP address into an A-record for your domain.

3. Configure your server

In my examples, my domain name is vtt.danq.me and my server is at 1.2.3.4. Yours will be different!

Connect to your new server using SSH. Your host might even provide a web interface if you don’t have an SSH client installed: e.g. Linode’s “Launch LISH Console” button will do pretty-much exactly that for you. Log in as root using the password you chose when you set up the server (or your SSH private key, if that’s your preference). Then, run each of the commands below in order (the full script is available as a single file if you prefer).

3.1. Install prerequisites

You’ll need unzip (to decompress Foundry), nodejs (to run Foundry), ufw (a firewall, to prevent unexpected surprises), nginx (a webserver, to act as a reverse proxy to Foundry), certbot (to provide a free SSL certificate for Nginx), nvm (to install pm2) and pm2 (to keep Foundry running in the background). You can install them all like this:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install -y unzip nodejs ufw nginx certbot nvm
npm install -g pm2

3.2. Enable firewall

By default, Foundry runs on port 30000. If we don’t configure it carefully, it can be accessed directly, which isn’t what we intend: we want connections to go through the webserver (over https, with http redirecting to https). So we configure our firewall to allow only these ports to be accessed. You’ll also want ssh enabled so we can remotely connect into the server, unless you’re exclusively using an emergency console like LISH for this purpose:

ufw allow ssh
ufw allow http
ufw allow https
ufw enable

3.3. Specify domain name

Putting the domain name we’re using into a variable for the remainder of the instructions saves us from typing it out again and again. Make sure you type your domain name (that you pointed to your server in step 2), not mine (vtt.danq.me):

DOMAIN=vtt.danq.me

3.4. Get an SSL certificate with automatic renewal

So long as the DNS change you made has propogated, this should Just Work. If it doesn’t, you might need to wait for a bit then try again.

certbot certonly --agree-tos --register-unsafely-without-email --rsa-key-size 4096 --webroot -w /var/www/html -d $DOMAIN

Don’t continue past this point until you’ve succeeded in getting the SSL certificate sorted.

The certificate will renew itself automatically, but you also need Nginx to restart itself whenever that happens. You can set that up like this:

printf "#!/bin/bash\nservice nginx restart\n" > /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/post/restart-nginx.sh
chmod +x /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/post/restart-nginx.sh

3.5. Configure Nginx to act as a reverse proxy for Foundry

You can, of course, manually write the Nginx configuration file: just remove the > /etc/nginx/sites-available/foundry from the end of the printf line to see the configuration it would write and then use/adapt to your satisfaction.

set +H
printf "server {\n listen 80;\n listen [::]:80;\n server_name $DOMAIN;\n\n # Redirect everything except /.well-known/* (used for ACME) to HTTPS\n root /var/www/html/;\n if (\$request_uri !~ \"^/.well-known/\") {\n return 301 https://\$host\$request_uri;\n }\n}\n\nserver {\n listen 443 ssl http2;\n listen [::]:443 ssl http2;\n server_name $DOMAIN;\n\n ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/$DOMAIN/fullchain.pem;\n ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/$DOMAIN/privkey.pem;\n\n client_max_body_size 300M;\n\n location / {\n # Set proxy headers\n proxy_set_header Host \$host;\n proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For \$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;\n proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto \$scheme;\n\n # These are important to support WebSockets\n proxy_set_header Upgrade \$http_upgrade;\n proxy_set_header Connection \"Upgrade\";\n\n proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:30000/;\n }\n}\n" > /etc/nginx/sites-available/foundry
ln -sf /etc/nginx/sites-available/foundry /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/foundry
service nginx restart

3.6. Install Foundry

3.6.1. Create a place for Foundry to live

mkdir {vtt,data}
cd vtt

3.6.2. Download and decompress it

Screenshot from FoundryVTT showing where to find the "Timed URL" download link button. — For this step, you’ll need to get a Timed URL from the Purchased Licenses page on your FoundryVTT account.

Substitute in your Timed URL in place of <url from website> (keep the quotation marks – " – though!):

wget -O foundryvtt.zip "<url from website>"
unzip foundryvtt.zip
rm foundryvtt.zip

3.6.3. Configure PM2 to run Foundry and keep it running

Now you’re finally ready to launch Foundry! We’ll use PM2 to get it to run automatically in the background and keep running:

pm2 start --name "Foundry" node -- resources/app/main.js --dataPath=/root/data

You can watch the logs for Foundry with PM2, too. It’s a good idea to take a quick peep at them to check it launched okay (press CTRL-C to exit):

pm2 logs 0

4. Start adventuring!

Provide your license key to get started, and then immediately change the default password: a new instance of Foundry has a blank default password, which means that anybody on Earth can administer your server: get that changed to something secure!

Now you’re running on Foundry!

Footnotes

¹ Which currency you pay in, and therefore how much you pay, for a Foundry license depends on ~~where in the world you are~~ where your VPN endpoint says you are. You might like to plan accordingly.

² Running Foundry as root is dangerous, and you should consider the risks for yourself. Adding a new user is relatively simple, but for a throwaway server used for a single game session and then destroyed, I wouldn’t bother. Specifically, the risk is that a vulnerability in Foundry, if exploited, could allow an attacker to reconfigure any part of your new server, e.g. to host content of their choice or to relay spam emails. Running as a non-root user means that an attacker who finds such a vulnerability can only trash your Foundry instance.