I'm Doing Technology, Whoo Look At Me Go
s left a reply to Can't Work in the guestbook:
I hope they get you a new work computer. 7th gen is waaay too old for them to expect you to get stuff done.
Thanks, me too! Although as always, I'm frustrated that technology has led us here. A 7-year-old CPU should be more than fine for my work. Everything my job entails was a solved problem 20 years ago: a javascript web app,1 email, spreadsheets, scanning2 and printing. That's it. There's no technological reason I shouldn't be able to use a computer from 2005. But of course new frameworks have to continually be invented that demand more computing power so Microsoft et al can keep extorting money from us forever. But hey, I've sung this song a thousand times, let's talk about the technology on everyone's mind: email.
It's totally fine for people to use the guestbook for individual post replies, and s probably did that intentionally rather than sending an email, but it did get me thinking about how I handle email on this blog. I think readers might not know they can click the raccoon at the end of a post to send an email reply to it. It's a general contact form, but I set it up to auto-fill the subject line with the title of the post, which I'm pretty proud of. But I figure the blog is getting new readers all the time who may not have read the post explaining this, and it's not obvious, especially on mobile, where you can't hover your mouse cursor over the icon to see if it's interactive. So, I'm going to make it a traditional button.
The reason I didn't do this in the first place is because I have an aversion to inconsistent UI. It was fine when each post just had one button (the upvote one), but if there are now two buttons, I want them to be in the same place and look like each other. I could use CSS to make the buttons look the same, but I can't place them next to each other. The upvote button is hard-coded to always display between the tags and the footer.
Making the end-of-post emoji the reply button was my idea to introduce this feature without needing to create "UI". It's just, like, the cherry on top of the text. But no one expects this cherry to be interactive, so it makes sense that nobody's used it that way. I reckon I'll have to get over myself.
Spam
What's making me rethink my reply button is that I've received more spam through this contact form than legitimate correspondence. The number of spam messages I've been sent is just two, but I'm kind of surprised that it's any. I've always used a "naive captcha" for this sort of form, the idea being that putting a simple human-answerable question (my go-to being "what color is the sky?") will block most automated spam bots, which theoretically aren't sophisticated enough to parse and answer this kind of question. Like I know the technology exists, but I don't think of myself as a high-value target, so I expected it would foil the kind of bots that spray garbage indiscriminately and see what sticks. But apparently not anymore!
I've created a slightly more sophisticated captcha system that involves identifying emoji. Hopefully it's accessible for people, it's all emoji that existed in Unicode 6.0, so if you're using a browser that's been updated since 2010, you should be able to see them. I expect it's not screen-reader friendly, so I intend to make an audio option once I can get back into the studio (edit: audio option now available.)
Really Simple RSS
As long as I'm airing my technical grievances, or grieving my technical errances, I thought I'd talk about vore.website. It's not the name I would've picked, but it's a very very slick browser RSS aggregator. I added a blogroll link to the topnav where you can see my feed. It just had one problem: I can't add any bear blogs! When I try to add an RSS or atom feed, I get an error stating that it's seeing HTML when it expected XML; when I try to use the "finger" feature to automatically find a blog's feed, I'm getting a 403 error. I expect this has something to do with the recent bot mitigations put in place to deal with slop scrapers. I understand the necessity, but I'm not sure why v.w would get caught up in it; as Herman points out, RSS feeds are explicitly designed for bots. I don't know if it's overzealous blocking on bear's end or if v.w is doing something that looks shady. I'm not sure if it's a bug or intended behavior.
Regardless, I've been trying to find a self-hosted alternative to test and I'm not coming up with much. All of the PHP feed readers seem over-engineered for what I want. I'd like something with the simple elegance of v.w and no additional features. I don't even really need the "save" feature. I don't need anything that interacts with a database or tried to be a "web app", I just want to upload a php file, change the permissions, edit a list of feeds, and go. Reverse chronological list of titles and links, that's it. If anyone knows anything like this, please let me know. A perl or python script would probably also work.
Shouldn't Need to Say This
Someone submitted my previous post to a website called "S•••••• News". It's a news aggregator like Reddit or Slashdot, but instead of harmless internet points, clicking the upvote button gives the submitter cryptocurrency. As should be obvious to any long-time readers, I do not give anyone permission to use my posts in this manner. I am anti-crypto. Do not submit any of my work to this website or any that operate on a similar principle. If you're the person who submitted it, please remove it. Thank you.
That said, feel free to post my work to traditional social aggregators. Fark, Digg, Hacker News, Lemmy, StumbleUpon,3 wherever you think my post might earn you a lot of internet points, go for it. Take your orange arrows and golden manbabies4 with my blessing 🦝
The proprietary web app is the unsung hero of my workflow. It was coded in pure javascript, it looks like it did when it was written in 2006, and it flies. It's such a joy to use, comparatively speaking, that it puts every "modern" web app to shame. It's a good reminder of the true enemy: not javascript, but frameworks.↩
I forgot, we can't switch to ChromeOS because it wouldn't work with our scanners. There is apparently a linux driver, so pretend I said that.↩
Offer contingent on these sites not pivoting or having pivoted to crypto or AI shit. Terms apply. When in doubt, ask.↩
It's a... look, ask your uncle.↩