I knew about this for Google’s own fonts but had no idea they offered the option to use custom fonts. Is there any easy place to find a list of them? I wonder if the custom fonts are just hardcoded/pushed to their CDN alongside all the other ones.
A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way.
A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-)
One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)
What inspired me to pursue computer related fields was making little badges and forum signatures in Photoshop as a teen. Heartwarming to see this tradition has persisted
My similar happy childhood moment was when my home page made the Netscape "Rants and Raves" page for my extensive tribute to Lindsey Wagner (the actress who played the Bionic Woman), and that leading to my local newspaper interviewing me for an article on what the heck this "World Wide Web" was. I went on and on about how the web was revolutionary as an equalizer, allowing anybody to publish and actually be heard without the old barriers to entry. Sounded good, but the web hasn't exactly fully lived up to my vision.
Pamphleteering has a storied tradition. Self-publishing remains accessible today.
What confuses me are the reflexive "why would I publish if I'm not getting the ad revenue" and "why would anyone take their time w/o getting paid" type remarks.
Same comments about music: nobody will record songs without getting paid. And games: what's even the point in playing a shooter without dropping loot?
The last one encapsulates the whole problem well.
Over on /r/division2 a majority of players are baffled by a one month only "Realism" mode (all March, worth trying!) that turns off loot boxes and loot drops from tangos. You can solo or co-op the Division 2 Warlords of New York expansion, set in Manhattan, receiving a couple additional base weapons and weapon mods each mission completed. It's refreshing to enjoy beating scenarios while liberated from opening every scrap pile on the street then sorting through inventory for hours.
Gamers on reddit seem universally convinced the gameplay loop for a tactical PvE shooter should be about getting the next loot, rather than executing a mission cleanly or enjoying a strategically cooperative evening with friends defeating a zip code and its boss.
"I won't play a game that's not rewarding." "I won't write a song that doesn't make me a millionaire." "I won't capture my thoughts on a subject unless I get $0.003 an eyeball."
Sounds like classic crowding-out of intrinsic motivation.
There's a story, I can't find the page at the moment, of someone who was getting pranked all the time (his house TPed or egged or something). So he offered the miscreants $1 to do it tomorrow. He kept on doing it like this, and then a few days later, he offered a quarter. By the time he had got down to a dime, they said "there's no way we're going to do it for such a measly sum" and left.
Better sourced examples also exist: fewer citizens supported a decision to build a nuclear waste repository in Switzerland enjoyed more support if they would be offered compensation: https://www.bsfrey.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/crowding-ef... p. 96 (sixth page of the PDF).
> What confuses me are the reflexive "why would I publish if I'm not getting the ad revenue" and "why would anyone take their time w/o getting paid" type remarks.
I published free content during the 90s and early 2000s in the internet, so I lived through that moment when you write something just for the pleasure of it. What I think it changed is that back at the time, it was you and your keyboard and that was your gun. The best content (that is, the best idea+writing) won. People would share in forums, MSN, emails, with friends, etc. It was more democratic in the sense that we were all equal.
Today that doesn't work anymore. You can write a very good piece but no one will discover it because the behaviour has changed. You probably will have to invest in ads, or being someone already known in the topic, etc. And I am talking before AI, with all the AI noise/slop/content, it's impossible today. So if I am going to fight against big media who are also writing shitting content about the same topics, or Instagram influencers who are posting silly memes, and I need to invest money, may as well try to earn something back.
I don't use 88x31 buttons but I do maintain an old-fashioned blogroll on my personal website: https://susam.net/roll.html
I follow the same set of websites with my feed reader too. There is an OPML file at the end of that page that I use with my feed reader. I keep the list intentionally small so that I can realistically read every post that appears on these websites on a regular basis.
Although I usually read new posts in my feed reader, I still visit each website on the list at least, roughly, once a month, just to see these personal sites in their full glory. These are blogs I have been following for years, in fact some of them for a couple of decades now! So when a new post appears on one of these websites, I make time to read it. It is one of the joys of browsing the Web that I have cherished ever since I first got online on the information superhighway.
Keeping the list small also makes it easy for me to notice when a website goes defunct. Over all these years a few websites did indeed sadly disappear, which I then removed from my list.
The only way my Logitech MX Master mouse is remotely usable on macOS is with both linearmouse and mos, and that was really disappointing to me, because online, the MX Master mouse is sold as the best Mac mouse. Unbelievable that anyone actually uses it without those tweaks.
Without both, the mouse scroll wheel is so slow, laggy and imprecise. It’s unbelievably bad.
Hardware wise the mx3 is the best mouse for me. The software is dreadful though. It seems more like marketing than software. Nice pictures on the site. Not designed by a team that cares about good software. They should take mos and linearmouse as examples
Turns out googling for "8½ window system" gives no results (although Google's KI has this to say 'Based on the search results, "8½" refers to the
Windows 8.1 update, which was released in 2013 to address critical user feedback regarding the original Windows 8')
Maybe if you’ve got some ancient software that’s missing source code and only runs with X Y and Z conditions, you could continue to offer it on the web and build around it like that? Not sure if that would be practical at all, but could be interesting
The website does say that it was ‘vibe coded’[0] so perhaps the author didn’t test it very thoroughly? They apparently do ‘vibe coding’ courses so.. that’s something.
For sure! I was so surprised to see that this was done all in browser. I mean there’s no reason that shouldn’t be possible in 2026 considering there’s services that do this server side, but still it’s always impressive when something like this comes along.
ugh. i came to see why this site failed completely to work as expected. turns out that a human has barely been anywhere near it and thinks that delivering non-working slop is fine. what a waste of my time and printer paper.
Also, I’m also surprised an XSS attack like hasn’t yet been actually used to harvest credentials like passwords through browser autofill[0].
It seems like the worm code/the replicated code only really attacks stuff on site. But leaking credentials (and obviously people reuse passwords across sites) could be sooo much worse.
I think autofill-based credential harvesting is harder than it sounds because browsers and password managers treat saved credentials as a separate trust boundary, and every vendor implements different heuristics. The tricky part is getting autofill to fire without a real user gesture and then exfiltrating values, since many browsers require exact form attributes or a user activation and several managers ignore synthetic events.
If an attacker wanted passwords en masse they could inject fake login forms and try to simulate focus and typing, but that chain is brittle across browsers, easy to detect and far lower yield than stealing session tokens or planting persistent XSS. Defenders should assume autofill will be targeted and raise the bar with HttpOnly cookies, SameSite=strict where practical, multifactor auth, strict Content Security Policy plus Subresource Integrity, and client side detection that reports unexpected DOM mutations.
It is fantastic that Firefox gives us the benefit of choice though. Maybe Chrome or whatever has better UX taste out of the box, but good luck changing anything if you disagree.
I wrote a blog post about how I customized Firefox exactly to what I wanted https://varun.ch/posts/firefox/ including a minimal UI, monospaced font, sidebar, etc etc. userChrome.css is a great feature and it’s amazing that it’s just exposed to the user.
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