Linking the web

Cool apps

(See also: my software reviews)

• Bashblog a single Bash script to create blogs
• UberGallery The simple PHP photo gallery
• PunBB 120K ought to be enough for anybody!
• MoonMoon simple php app for showing several feeds on one page
• WabiSabi960 clean and simple wiki engine (the one surviving descendant of my original research code)
• Domino: single-page self-editing mind maps made of sticky notes
• Nullboard: single-page kanban board app that saves to local storage and / or files
• Slingcode: IDE for web apps in a single web page, with local storage and sharing over WebTorrent.

Reference

• PHP 7 Reference
• CSS Bed: a site about classless CSS, with explanations, demonstrations and links
• HTML and CSS simple tips and tricks for your website
• rethink the web
• Microjs: Fantastic Micro-Frameworks and Micro-Libraries for Fun and Profit!
• bobby-tables.com: A guide to preventing SQL injection
• Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator
• The Open Graph protocol (see also: the OGP page on indieweb.org)
• RSS 2.0 Specification
• A List of the Best Flat File CMS
• The Flat File CMS Directory
• StaticGen: open source static site generators
• Awesome static generators
• Static Site Generators: the definitive listing
• Pocket Guide to Writing SVG
• Link types | MDN
• List of XML and HTML character entity references - Wikipedia
• Web colors - Wikipedia
• java - Swing JEditorPane CSS capabilities - Stack Overflow

Philosophy

• Web Design: The First 100 Years
• A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (how naive we were)
• Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us - YouTube
• In Defense of Inclusionism
• The Hyperchat Modality
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
• Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
• The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview
• Metacrap

Fediverse

• Federated Networks Association
• We Distribute
• Distributopia / masto-world-overview · GitLab
• GitHub - joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon: An increasingly less-brief guide to Mastodon
• Mastodon Mobs and Mastodon Mods: Dealing with Outside Groups Pressuring Instance Administrators

• PeerTube's Content Wasteland (26 October 2021)
• Facebook Is Censoring People For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon (11 September 2021)
• Mastodon Is Dead, Long Live Misskey (5 August 2021)
• An Open Letter Calling for the Resignation of Eugen Rochko (Gargron) from Mastodon Development (31 July 2021)
• Irreconcilable Differences (31 July 2021)
• Social Suburbia (24 January 2021)
• Fediverse in 2020 (2 January 2021)
• Mastodon looking for moderators speaking Tamil, Bengali: Founder (29 April 2019)
• What instance should I choose? (7 February 2019)
• Plaidophile: Mastodon instance rambling (17 November 2018)
• Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system (31 August 2018)
• Dogpiling Wil (30 August 2018)
• The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it (August 2018)
• The Do-Everything System: An in-depth review of Hubzilla 3.0 (27 February 2018)
• A Brief History of the GNU Social Fediverse and ‘The Federation’ (1 April 2017)

Social media

• Combatting online racist abuse (from Twitter UK) (10 August 2021) Key insight: anonymous accounts are NOT the issue.
• How to Make Twitter Suck Less (4 July 2021)
• The magic slab of glass that contains all my friends… or not (9 December 2020)
• How Artists on Twitter Tricked Spammy T-Shirt Stores Into Admitting Their Automated Art Theft (4 December 2019)
• Remembering Google Plus (25 April 2019)
• Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too. (25 April 2019)
• Looking back at Google+ (8 October 2018)
• NYPD's Twitter photo contest backfires with images of aggressive police force (22 April 2014)
• You didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral—corporations did (28 March 2013)
• Applebee’s Overnight Social Media Meltdown: A Photo Essay (2 February 2013)

Tumblr

• An empty San Francisco lot and 12 other things worth more than Tumblr (16 August 2019)
• Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what’s next for Tumblr (14 August 2019)
• Automattic Acquires Tumblr, Plans to Rebuild the Backend Powered by WordPress (12 August 2019)
• Verizon is looking to sell Tumblr after squandering its potential (2 May 2019)
• One month after controversial adult-content purge, far-right pages are thriving on Tumblr (17 January 2019)
• A Farewell to Tumblr which reads like a love letter (25 December 2018)
• The (Straight) Male Gaze Rules on Sanitized Social Media (11 December 2018)
• Meet the Tumblr castaways trying to save its NSFW content (8 December 2018)
• Why Tumblr’s ban on adult content is bad for LGBTQ youth (6 December 2018)
• The inaugural DashCon 2014 did not go as planned (13 July 2014)

Facebook

• Imagine the End of Facebook (7 October 2021)
• Facebook's war on switching costs (28 August 2021)
• “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation (14 September 2020)
• Facebook (FB) Paid Contractors to Transcribe User Audio Files (13 August 2019)
• Facebook moderators break their NDAs to expose desperate working conditions (19 June 2019)
• Facebook has struggled to recruit since Cambridge Analytica scandal (15 May 2019)
• Mark Zuckerberg Does Not Speak for the Internet (April 2019)
• Facebook’s ad delivery could be inherently discriminatory, researchers say (4 April 2019)
• Facebook secretly lobbied in favour of Article 13 of undesired EU copyright directive (2 April 2019)
• What We Should Learn From “Facebook Research” (January 2019)
• Mark Zuckerberg’s idealistic Facebook vision is haunting the company (19 December 2018)
• Facebook Knows Everything About You, And If You Don't Believe Us Here's Proof (22 April 2014)
• How to Protect Your Privacy from Facebook's Graph Search (January 2013)

Content management systems

• Forgive me WordPress for I have sinned… (22 June 2020)
• WordPress alternatives? (8 April 2019)
• “Help, I want to move my webcomic to an independent host using WordPress, how do I start??” (December 2018)
• 6 Reasons to Love Smaller CMS (6 October 2018)

Business

• Verizon sells AOL and Yahoo for about half of what it paid (3 May 2021) Purchased by the owner of the Venetian casino in Las Vegas
• Yahoo, the Destroyer (25 April 2021) How the historic company became known as a bumbling villain of internet culture
• Project Wonderful's sussessor? (21 July 2019)

Ethics and law

• The Web3 Fraud (16 December 2021)
• Google Drive could soon start locking your files (15 December 2021)
• Creative Commons, summarized (8 October 2021)
• Indonesia’s Proposed Online Intermediary Regulation May be the Most Repressive Yet (16 February 2021)
• ‘No longer acceptable’ for platforms to take key decisions alone, EU Commission says (12 January 2021)
  This is terrifying. Now they speak up? When marginalized people are silenced online, where's the outrage from politicians?
  Old farts, get your hands off the internet already.
• How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review (23 December 2020)
• You saved the .ORG domain! (1 May 2020)
• Breaking: California Attorney General delays .org sale (31 January 2020)
• Google to stop showing news snippets for French users (25 September 2019)
• 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service (5 August 2019)
• Terminating Service for 8Chan (5 August 2019)
• Google employees are eavesdropping, even in Flemish living rooms, VRT NWS has discovered (10 July 2019)
• Uh-oh .io: Question mark hangs over trendy tech startup domains as UN condemns British empire hangover (27 May 2019)
• Help Keep Domain Prices in Check (24 April 2019)
• Scary legalese and the content clause: Don’t be afraid of the license grant! (12 April 2019)
• After years of insisting that DRM in HTML wouldn't block open source implementations, Google says it won't support open source implementations (3 April 2019)
• The European Copyright Directive: What Is It, and Why Has It Drawn More Controversy Than Any Other Directive In EU History? (March 2019)
• How Much of the Internet Is Fake? (December 2018)
• Web host gives FCC a 28.8Kbps slow lane in net neutrality protest (May 2014)

History

• Don’t Lie To Me About Web 2.0 (24 May 2022)
• By Our Powers Combined … (20 November 2020) How the webring became the grassroots tool of choice for sharing content online in the ’90s.
• Zip Files: History, Explanation and Implementation (26 February 2020)
• Lawrence Roberts, Who Helped Design Internet’s Precursor, Dies at 81 (30 December 2018)
• Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web (20 June 2017)
• Ermahgerddon: The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl (October 2015)

Formats and protocols

• I love email (22 July 2022) Email just works.
• Write plain text files (2 March 2022)
• Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst (17 January 2022)
• DNS "propagation" is actually caches expiring (6 December 2021)
• Gopher, The Competing Standard To Www In The ’90s Is Still Worth Checking Out (28 September 2021)
• Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash (10 September 2021)
• RSS is Wonderful (7 February 2021)
• Plaintext HTTP in a Modern World (6 January 2021)
• FTP Fadeout (25 September 2020) The beating heart of the early internet may have been FTP, or file transfer protocol. But after 50 years of mainstream use, its demise may be imminent.
• Why IRC is Still Good in $CURRENT_YEAR (30 August 2020)
• RSS, or why lack of developer imagination will be the end of the open web (11 August 2020)
• PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later (9 August 2020)
• RSS: there’s nothing better (27 June 2019)
• Finger is Gopher (9 January 2019)
• Internet protocols are changing (12 December 2017)
• The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol (August 2016)

Browsers

• A Web Browser Built for Me (1 November 2021)
• Firefox Now Sends Your Address Bar Keystrokes to Mozilla (8 October 2021)
• Here’s Why Firefox is Seeing a Continuous Decline for Last 12 Years (11 September 2021) All of this. So much. And people begging us to start using Firefox again are only adding insult to injury.
• Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products (11 August 2020)
• Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes, despite shared codebase (9 June 2019)
• Google Just Gave 2 Billion Chrome Users A Reason To Switch To Firefox (30 May 2019)
• Goodbye, EdgeHTML - The Mozilla Blog (6 December 2018)
• The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity (4 September 2018)
• Because Browser Diversity Is Good For The Web (30 June 2017)
• Surfing Modern Web With Ancient Browsers (3 March 2014)
• New Internet Explorer 7 Tax :) (13 June 2012)

Programming

• Please Stop Using Grey Text (1 April 2022)
• 5 things you don't need Javascript for (28 February 2022)
• So-called modern web developers are the culprits (17 December 2021)
• Why I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks (26 June 2021)
• Building Flounder (7 January 2021)
• Flutter Web: A Fractal of Bad Design (31 October 2020)
• Indieweb h-cards (11 April 2020): Using microformats to build a profile page
• React (26 August 2019) Why I have a problem with React the library and spend a lot of time talking to my therapist
• A short note on HTML5 article, section and hgroup (4 July 2019)
• Why I'm still using jQuery in 2019 (27 May 2019)
• The Next CSS Frontier — Classless (8 April 2019)
• HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points (30 January 2019)
• The Trouble with PHP (8 May 2018)

• Rotary: A Retro Web Input for Phone Numbers (April 2016)
• Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript (6 March 2016)

• 56 Unique Lorem Ipsum Generators (11 July 2013)
• CSS3 Pong: I****e things to do with CSS #17 (14 May 2013)
• MPEG1 Video Decoder in JavaScript (7 May 2013)
• Making an accessible dialog box (12 February 2013)
• Advanced ARIA tip #1: Tabs in web apps (2 February 2013)
• Star Wars 3D Scrolling Text in CSS3 (24 October 2012)

Performance and robustness

• Botspam Apocalypse (3 August 2022)
• The Resilience of the Internet in Ukraine (10 March 2022)
• Why Your Website Should Work Without Javascript (17 March 2021)
• The Cost of Javascript Frameworks (21 April 2020)
• Obese websites and planet-sized metronomes (7 June 2020)
• This Page is Designed to Last (19 December 2019)
• Browsers are pretty good at loading pages, it turns out (21 July 2019)
• Stop pushing JavaScript! (2 July 2019)
• Writing HTML in HTML (19 June 2019)
• The Ethics of Web Performance (9 January 2019)
• BLOATED (23 September 2018)
• How to Build a Low-tech Website? (September 2018)
• Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible (7 August 2018)
• Maybe your blog post doesn’t need that 2000-pixel header image (10 February 2018)
• What happens when Imgur goes out of business? (16 March 2017)
• The Website Obesity Crisis (29 October 2015)
• How to Build a Low-tech Internet (October 2015)
• Wladimir Palant's notes: Please don't use externally hosted JavaScript libraries (30 June 2014)

Culture

• Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival? (21 May 2022)
• What The Small Web Is Missing (14 February 2022)
• Forget Twitter Threads; Write A Blog Post Instead! (21 October 2021)
• Organic, Homegrown HTML (12 February 2021)
• Make your own independent website (16 January 2021)
• Why Medium is Not the Home for Your Ideas (22 July 2020)
• Ranting about the web (14 June 2020)
• Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog (14 December 2019)
• Into the Personal-Website-Verse (12 May 2019)
• Blue Whale: What is the truth behind an online 'suicide challenge'? (13 January 2019)
• The conventional wisdom about not feeding trolls makes online abuse worse (12 July 2018)
• Why OpenStreetMap is in Serious Trouble (16 February 2018)

• 4chan's Overlord Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away (13 March 2015)
• Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different (10 November 2013)

• The Antifragility of the Web (December 2012)
• The Internet of the Dead (November 2012)
• Music: The Internet’s Original Sin (July 2012)
• RIP, Aaron Swartz (12 January 2012)

• TV Tropes Pt. 3: If you liked Dwarf Fortress, you’ll love Twilight: Breaking Dawn (25 December 2011)
• TVTropes Pt 2: Trope (But Not Troper) Communities (22 December 2011)
• TVTropes Pt 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet (21 December 2011)