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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

141–150 of 458 posts

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#141
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. FYI there's also SingleFileZ > SingleFileZ is a fork of SingleFile that allows you to save a webpage as a self-extracting HTML file. This HTML file is also a valid ZIP file which contains the resources (images, fonts, stylesheets and frames) of the saved page. https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ

I'll implement the "save bookmark page" feature in both extensions :)

Whoa. I just installed SingleFileZ for FF and it is working great. Before I was using wget and that was clunky. This is working great since I can just toss a single file up on my server and we are good to go. Thanks for this!

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#142

Make sure that archive.org - the Internet Archive - catches your website in "The Wayback Machine". Catering to that is a pretty good strategy for archiving for at least the next couple of decades, considering that institute's staying power. And on that note - consider donating to them.

The Internet Archive is a fantastic resource. And right now, they happen to match every donation two to one (so $5 becomes $5 + 2 * $5 = $15 dollars!)

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#143
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key-value store has nothing to do with blockchain.

FileCoin is a blockchain and is the incentivization layer on top of IPFS that allows users to rent hard drive space. It is intrinsically connected with IPFS.

The parent comment is still accurate. IPFS isn't a blockchain and shouldn't be dismissed for this use case, which is more or less what it was designed for.

Filecoin is just for incentives, but IPFS has been running for years without it.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#144
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox actually purges history automatically. For instance, the oldest history I have on this browser right now is from January 2018. I found about this the hard way.

I have this problem. Some bits of history are gone except from old backups of profile directories and profiles where I've already set places.history.expiration.max_pages to some absurdly high number. I need to do a handful of experiments to see exactly how this interacts with Sync, even though I've (foolishly) already synced the important profiles. I'd hope that the cloud copies of the places database just keeps grow…

Even if you set the setting, how can you be sure that it won't be reset on an upgrade or that you'll remember to set it if you need a new profile (perhaps your old one becomes buggy, crufty, corrupt, or all three)? I thought I had all my history retained until one day I couldn't find a website I knew I had visited years ago, and took a closer look at my history and was very unpleasantly surprised... What happened? I'll never know, but my suspicion is that Firefox reset the history retention setting at some point along the way. If you do any web dev, you know Firefox occasionally backstabs you and changes on updates. The only way to be sure over a decade-plus is to regularly export to a safe text file where the Mozilla devs can't mess with it. I can't undo my history loss, but I do know I have lost little history since.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or don’t specify any font at all and leave it up to the user’s preference. Why presume you know better than the user?

The trouble is that the defaults tend not to be the best fonts that are available, and very few users change them. I have changed them myself, but I don’t know of anyone else that has. For myself, I wish that people would leave Arial, Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, &c. out of their sans-serif stack, having only their one preferred font and sans-serif, or better still sans-serif alone; but as a developer I unders…

Unfortunately, I'm one of those developers :( My font stack is:

  font-family: system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
for prose and

  font-family: ui-monospaced, Menlo, monospace;
for monospaced text. The first being the user's preferred font, the second as a good (IMO?) default that I impose on them, and the third as a full fallback. I'm conflicted on whether this is the right balance between user choice and handling browsers that support nothing.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#146
post #45

Frequently appearing http://danluu.com/ on HN is one of these sites that are absolutely minimal.

On my large screen, the lines are so long that it's difficult to read. But other than that, it's a nice inspiration for how minimal a website can be.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#147

I am all for archiving important web content, but imo most of the web content is not important and impossible to archive anyway. Too many pages use dynamic content which make web archives useless. Also having too much data just dilutes the useful stuff. If you have useful content (the author should) store it in some other way. Put articles in any simple markup format like markdown in git, distribute videos using torr…

> Browsers should remove quirk modes and flat out refuse to render anything which cannot be interpreted 100% unambiguously.

Unfortunately the web seems to have de-facto standardized on these quirks and large swaths of the internet would break if you removed them.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#148
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files. or use Google Web fonts, and set let last option in your font-family to be "serif" or "sans-serif" to let an appropriate typeface be used if your third-party font is unreachable. That's the beauty of text, the content should still be readable even if your desired font is unavailable.

Google web fonts were a great way to make my site slower. I don’t know if it’s the latency here in Australia or what, but (especially for developing locally) google web fonts were a big headache for having snappy webpages. I took the time one day to produce my own webfont files and self-host those, and the difference in site load speed is like night and day.

And that's where they are not banned. Many pages simply won't load at all in the PRC because someone thought a Google analytics tracker or a hosted library should load before the content (which then never does).

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#149
post #124

Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. In comparison, the websites that I've built and hosted or deployed mys…

If Jekyll died tomorrow, I still have the HTML to keep the website running, more or less. It's a build step in my pipeline but not one that abstracts it in such a way that I cannot use the final product as my archive. I'm not sure that a CMS could let me do the same.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#150
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari does the same, even though I tell it to never clear browsing history.

I think Chrome(ium) does as well. Very annoying tbh.

Chrome was the first browser I encountered that deletes history without being instructed to.
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