Tech, life and everything else
This is a collection of links I stumbled across and found worth sharing. Also see the blogroll for links to blogs I regularly read.
British domain registry Nominet created a world map of country-code top-level domains. It’s really interesting to see that .tk (Tokelau) is is the world’s largest ccTLD, because registration is free and no expired domains get deleted. After that comes .cn (China) and .de (Germany).
It’s not that uncommon to come across a link to Twitter. But when opening the link in the browser, I am often told that the tweet has failed to load. This may be due to my Firefox settings, uBlock Origin or something else, but it was so annoying to have to click on “try again” that I installed an add-on that automatically redirects me from Twitter to Nitter. (See all my installed add-ons here.)
I’m currently browsing the docs of the static site generator Eleventy (also known as 11ty). Although I prefer Go and I’m not a big JavaScript (and npm) fan for various reasons, I now consider Eleventy as an alternative to Hugo for my blog. I’m reaching the limits of Hugo more often and have to find complicated workarounds, because it’s almost impossible to add custom functionalities to Hugo. Eleventy is apparently very flexible and can be easily extended.
Matt Baer from Write.as wrote about his ideas for a comment system for Write.as called Remark.as. I think he thought things out pretty well and instead of just building a comment system as known from other blog systems, he found a good solution that allows human conversations.
Desmond Rivet already wrote some pretty good articles explaining the IndieWeb (of which I already shared one on my blog) and now he adds another one about “How to Have a Conversation on the IndieWeb”. He explains things like Microformats, Webmentions and how those things play together. It’s a bit technical, but if you ever heard of words like “API” or “REST”, you’ll probably understand it.
Kev Quirk wrote a great article about why having “full post RSS feeds” is a good idea. It’s mainly because then people can use a feed reader, customize it to their personal preferences (font, contrast and other accessibility features) and read the content in their preferred way.
Today Telegram published a blog article regarding Coronavirus news. In it they also mentioned a channel where they announce official and verified channels with information on COVID-19. I just visited that channel out of curiosity and saw there’s a sticker pack with virus stickers. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about it. :thinking_face:
Annoying Technology is a site by Manuel Grabowski and Philipp Defner, where they share typical annoyances with technology. Situations that probably everyone knows: annoying software download pages, dark UI patterns while shopping at Amazon or design flaws.
The New York Times published a photo story (open the link in a private tab to avoid the login-wall) with photos of public places around the world in times of COVID-19. The emptiness in these pictures is on the one hand magical, but also somehow frightening. A virus has actually managed to stop the world.
I often talk about “RSS feeds” and that it’s my favorite way to follow content sources (news, blogs, YouTube channels) on the internet. Laura Kalbag wrote about how to read RSS in 2020 in which she explains the basics and benefits about RSS.