I’ve been doing a bit of research into XSLT. There was a time where XSLT was almost removed from chromium. The early consensus was that “XSLT is failure wrapped in pain” :-) imo, it’s good as a no build/compilation XML transformer and has fp vibes but way over engineered.

I know of four PHP static site generators.

1. Jigsaw: Laravel Blade templates. Source Code
2. Couscous: Twig templates. Source Code
3. Sculpin: Twig templates. Source Code
4. Spress: Twig templates. Source Code

The key advantage is obvious: dynamicity “technically” comes for free. Feedback/debugging loops “can” be made instantaneous, and scaling to a large output is probably not too difficult.

One downside is that corporate minded developers and consumers online will think you’re a noob for choosing PHP.

Random neo is a nice way to randomly browse Neocities. I’m always on the lookout for sites to add to my rss feed collection. It might be fun to upload a small meme micro blog on there once I get around to adding color/background image customization, if ever.

I might not remember correctly but lxc came out around 2008. Docker in 2013. The lxc commands had the trend of dashes in their name — lxc-attach, lxc-snapshot, lxc-copy and so forth. It had lots of boilerplate and a steep learning curve.

Then lxd arrived (in 2015?) to make everything user friendly. lxd is preferred. I still mostly use lxc out of habit.

After daily driving NixOS and the Nix pm for almost three years, it feels like it’ll be simplified by entities external to the project. It’s still in that academic phase (don’t do this/that) and needs software engineering asap.

That usually involves reducing boilerplate ruthlessly while generalizing/capturing fundamental uses cases (setting implicit best current practices). It’s reminiscent of lxc just before docker arrived for the masses.

btw this blog is served to you by NixOS :-)

My favorite way to know if a product/service works as advertised is to… use it. The devil is (usually) in the details, and the proof is in the eating. People naturally identify with the software/services they use, so getting an accurate picture (as an outsider) is tricky nowadays. A TOS can also give insight into a company’s product/service.

Watching the web tech mainstream/influencers transition back to a html first approach is fascinating. Frameworks are returning to single file soc approaches that bundle and progressively enhance scoped js and css components automatically.

See syntax for webc/11ty, svelte, enhance, lit/google, vuejs marko, astro, and more in a rare history lesson.

Chrome --headless can dump the dom to the command line. Set a virtual time budget in vms [?] for the js to settle down and then do stuff.

Html() {
  chromium \
    --headless \
    --incognito \
    --dump-dom \
    --virtual-time-budget=999999 \
    "$1"
}

HtmlToText() {
  lynx -stdin -dump -nolist
}

This has “peculiar” uses. Fun fact: invoking the name of chromium around normal people confers alien–like status.

Html 'https://www.youtube.com/' | HtmlToText

Every so often I’m reminded of how tricky Wikipedia is — especially for current events. It’s not magically unbiased. Inventing authoritative sources of truth with well timed edits for real world persuasive power is the oldest working trick in the book.

Words and identifiers are at most substitutes for intangibles that cannot be expressed. The power of naming matters more than the name itself.

Am I cool now? :)

“The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”