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Tag: web

  • Calendar for October 2026 with Weird Web October themes on each day and a cat icon on every day so-far in the month.

    Weird Web October 2026 (Christopher Kennedy-Nuรฑez)

    I love Weird Web October, and Christopher's off to an amazing start this year: well worth a look at his wacky projects for the month (and trying to find the cat in each one: I've managed!) before you go check out what everybody else who's participating is up to. Also... I might be about to join in!

    Read more (127 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 6 October, 2026
  • Re: Domains Cost More, Blogs Disappear

    While bemoaning the rising cost of domain names, Michael also observed that blogging and personal websites are suffering a lack of young newcomers. In my reply I disagree, saying that they're there... just not where he's looking for them!

    Read more (365 words)

    • Reply
    • 2 comments
    • posted 30 September, 2026
  • My newly-revamped personal site has an almost full suite of slash pages; something I'd been meaning to do for a while:

    https://danq.me/slashes

    Still no /now, but I'll get that sorted someday, perhaps!

    • Note
    • 2 comments
    • posted 27 September, 2026
  • Colour wheel diagram showing the transformation from a light blue into a medium purple.

    Styling :visited links using hue-rotation

    My new site theme offers a :visited link style, but for convenience it's based on a CSS hsl-transformation. Here's how it works...

    Read more (223 words)

    • Article
    • 3 comments
    • posted 26 September, 2026
  • After months of minor tweaks, on-and-off, I finally bit the bullet and hit "publish" on my new theme for DanQ.me. It's not perfect; it's got all kinds of bugs... but what's the point of having a personal webite if you can't trash it once in a while with an ill-advised "fun" rework, right?

    Full image of Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).
    Alt

    Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).

    • Note
    • 4 comments
    • posted 25 September, 2026
  • Here's a neat trick. I've got a web page with many HTML popovers, styled as modals to create a no-JS gallery/lightbox. But LCP suffers because the browser tries to reserve space for the images within (even though they're within not-yet-shown popovers).

    This CSS one-liner saved the day. It basically says "skip over not-yet open popovers on initial page render" -

    [popover]:not(:popover-open) {
      content-visibility: hidden;
    }

    I appreciate that Lighthouse isn't the last word in performance metrics, of course. But this change alone bumped an affected page's score from 76 to 100, so it's not nothing either!

    • Note
    • posted 25 September, 2026
  • Screenshot showing Opera's vertical tabs, showing a semi-readable DanQ.me page.

    Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)

    A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!

    Read more (388 words)

    • Article
    • posted 21 September, 2026
  • An email in Outlook 365, showing 'DanQ.me' in gold-gradient WordArt with a drop shadow.

    WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!

    25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...

    Read more - about 5 minutes (996 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 16 September, 2026
  • Re: How I made...

    Noah S shared how he used some PHP code to block specific badly-behaved bots from his website. I've got a few suggestions to help him make his block faster, easier-to-maintain, and more-thorough, either using PHP code or webserver configuration.

    Read more - about 5 minutes (982 words)

    • Reply
    • posted 14 September, 2026
  • Pixel Area (@pxlarea@mastodon.social) launched a couple of weeks ago, and DanQ.me was selected to be one of the initial "seed" blogs that were there at the outset (I'm at https://pxlarea.com/x38y34).

    I'm... honestly not sure what to make of it. Organising personal websites spatially seems like a strange idea (although there's a list view available too). And 'pixel' seems to be a strange name (at my desktop resolution, my 'pixel' comprises... 169 pixels). It's got a little bit of a "million dollar homepage" (remember that) feel to it... though at least it's not operating commercially. In fact, the best thing about it seems to be that it's home-grown indie/smolweb content.

    I guess it's a bit like a webring? (Maybe it needs an embeddable component that lets a site show it's "space" and hop to neighbours?)

    So... yeah; I'm undecided on this one. But, as always, I love when people do cool, random and experimental stuff with the Web!

    Full image of Screenshot from Pixel Area, showing a blue 'pixel' representing Dan Q.
    Alt

    Screenshot from Pixel Area, showing a blue 'pixel' representing Dan Q.

    • Note
    • posted 10 September, 2026
  • Use Firefox

    Ramkumar Shankar says you should use Firefox, and they're right: you should. Not just because it's a great browser, and it is, but because doing so helps protect the freedom and openness of the Web. Use Firefox.

    Read more (446 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 10 September, 2026
  • The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto

    The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto

    Jim Mitchell shared The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto. And it's excellent.

    Read more - about 5 minutes (990 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 4 comments
    • posted 24 August, 2026
  • GoAccess dashboard for the last week, showing 1.9M requests by 350K visitors, pulling 160GB of data, with a big of a jump in traffic on 14 July.

    How I (Don't) Collect Blog Statistics

    I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better.

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1295 words)

    • Article
    • 3 comments
    • posted 15 July, 2026
  • Demonstration using curl of a request to an image map URL, including a pair of coordinates as the query string, resulting in two different redirects as a result of two different coordinate pairs.

    Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs

    As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?

    Read more - about 4 minutes (824 words)

    • Article
    • 13 comments
    • posted 10 July, 2026
  • Composite screenshot showing the HTTP Toolkit app running on an emulated Android device, on top of the desktop application which is capturing packet data from the emulated device.

    Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you...)

    I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.

    Read more - about 5 minutes (1171 words)

    • Article
    • 156 comments
    • posted 9 July, 2026

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