WordPress has an affinity for back–doored radioactivity. If I can get my way (which is hard), a WordPress install has only 1 theme and 0 plugins.

wordpress/
|-- public
`-- wp-config.php

/* Disable installing plugins and themes */
define('DISALLOW_FILE_MODS', true);

No more need for npm in my personal stack! spawnSync + which returns the local browser’s path.

import puppeteer from "https://deno.land/x/puppeteer@16.2.0/mod.ts";

const chrome = "firefox";   /* Browser Chrome: "firefox" | "chromium" | "google-chrome" | ... */
const product = "firefox";  /* Product Base:   "firefox" | "chrome" */

const { status, stdout, stderr } = Deno.spawnSync("which", {
  args: [ chrome, ],
});

const executablePath = new TextDecoder().decode(stdout).trim();

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  headless: false,
  executablePath: executablePath,
  product: product,
});

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.setViewport({ width: 1024, height: 768, });

const sites = [ "example.com", ];

for (const site of sites) {
  await page.goto("http://" + site);
  await page.screenshot({ path: site + ".png" });
}

await browser.close();

deno run --allow-all --unstable main.ts

I’ve got so many feeds in my feed reader that selectively filtering terms is a necessity — it gets real meta huh? I know all I need to know about Next.js at this point, no more :-)

Static vs dynamic is a marketing trick. If truth be told a lot of tech marketing is highly suspicious…

“The finest eloquence is that which gets things done; the worst is that which delays them.”

I don’t know who said that, but that quote sums it all up.

Flexbox as a base layout is convenient but tricky due to CLS or “jank”. If the dimensions of the base flex container(s) are ambiguous, then the browser constantly recomputes the dimensions as HTML streams in.

My favorite trick is to give the browser dimension hints and avoid computational properties like flex. Set as many dimensions (width/height) as possible unambiguously. My Internet speed is sufficiently slow enough that I can see layout shifts in many sites, including my own (this micro blog).

The “CSS router” has always been quite the clever trick for navigating sufficiently small sites. This site uses it to scroll switch pages, and portable.fyi gets clever with visibility :target switching. Do it just right and no one notices unless they “inspect the elements”.

It’s always humbling when I get around to reading a web related spec. HTML and CSS have a lot of functionality. JavaScript’s not bad (it’s the easiest part of web development) but gives you just enough rope to do super silly things like reinventing all built in browser functions.

White spaces in HTML trick many into writing complex CSS — web development is trollish that way. Firefox’s developer tools show generated white spaces! Hopefully your abstraction is munging HTML faithfully. It’s easy to fight white spaces without realising it. That generally leads to using unsuitable display types and other shenanigans.

WordPress rants are a joy to read, but where’s the simpler, safer replacement? Never forget that software is highly corporatized and mostly crafted for corporations, not humans. WordPress sits among the few that mere mortals can work with and understand. The complete revival of static sites might save us, maybe.

Take the innocent PHP web server cli.

php -S 127.0.0.1:8080

Best not to use PHP’s web server cli (even for PHP) because routes with a dot (.) are assumed to be static files. Use a real web server or superior cli web servers with minor gotchas.

python -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1 8080
busybox httpd -f -p 127.0.0.1:8080
ruby -run -e httpd . -p 8080