I caught a glimpse of an interesting thing by chance. Meta Platforms aka Facebook hid the x from their login prompt on public pages–including government pages, then brought it back. ‘Twas on the desktop before mobile and perhaps (who knows) for a subset (as a test). A “login only public page” is for a near–distant future, set. Seriously though; developer documentation will become my final excuse to visit Facebook.

Isn’t this a beautiful lithographic painting? (Don’t worry, I got permission from the relevant authorities to post this)

The Chrome experimental recorder tool has been around for a long while. I thought it was still mostly wip but I got schooled and apparently, this is a more faster way to jump–start a puppeteer script/test:

Which browser engine “paints” HTML the smartest on my device? In the clip below; Surf substitutes for Safari and Chromium for Chrome. My blog is the testee since there’s guaranteed cache control and jitter.

Surf and by extension Safari (or any Webkit–based browser) wins imo. Webkit feels smooth (sneakily, too smooth). It’s probably partly why Safari on macOS/iOS feels so fast. Chrome (not Chromium) is almost on par or so I’ve been told. Not exactly web dev but interesting huh?

Strange. In the last few years, I’ve abandoned search engines for most programming related queries by chugging along happily with Recoll. If I had the time I’d sit down and hack out a web front–end for its Python API but the desktop interface supplied with HTML from my own web crawlers works beautifully (medoc92/recollwebui also exists).

Messing around with a statically generated site can easily lead into a web/browser spec rabbit hole. And.. that’s when I remember exactly why everything ends up written outside the browser’s framework into a js framework. I think Firefox is still the only browser that allows easily setting image fallback styling completely with just CSS?

I had some time to futz about updating my Isso setup and forgot that a while back they added Atom Feeds. It’s also neat that it uses Atom Threading (an example). Installation from source is easier too.

Hugo is a gateway for discovering neat golang libraries. Version 0.104.0 introduced a color extraction method that has lots of use–cases. An easy one is to generate basic image gradient placeholders. The browser has its own deferred/lazy loading logic so fancy image gradients (on a static site) require only a few lines of pre–generated CSS styles.

btw if anyone tells you that RSS is dead — they’re in a bubble. Bing is our witness; the hasfeed: prefix returns sites with a feed, the feed: prefix gives a direct feed link. No.. I’m not a secret Microsoft™ agent — DuckDuckGo and others support this too ;-) 38B+ are big boy numbers.

rss and xslt are a cozy combination. Out of annoyance with my flaky Internet connection I’ve paginated the rss and json feeds. Know what? After exploring various feed formats, the underlying problem seems to be incentives in feed generation tooling correctness across language ecosystems and not formats? Invalid atom, rss, and json feeds are all over the net.