Showing all posts tagged: web design

Linux OSs and CGI scripts: awesome, but not for everyone

23 October 2024

David Heinemeier Hansson looks at why more people don’t migrate to Linux operating systems:

The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it’s easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It’s hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort.

I run Linux Mint, possibly the most user-friendly Linux distribution AKA distro. For some reason, who knows, Mint reminds me of when I used to tinker with CGI scripts. I’m not talking about CGI as in computer generated imagery, but common gateway interface. In the days of old, CGI scripts helped make personal websites a little more interactive. They could do all sorts of things, but were widely used to power contact forms and guestbooks.

Web designers would hunt around for a CGI script that might aid them to do something or other on their website. In the same way a, say, WordPress publisher today would search out plug-ins. Once a suitable script had been located, they’d then go about configuring it, obviously provided their web host supported CGI scripts. While most scripts came ready to use, they usually required tweaking. Care needed to be taken doing this, because a misstep could render the script useless. Or worse.

For the first ten years I had a website, I hosted it at a smaller operation based in Sydney, NSW. They had a “sandbox” arrangement in place, where CGI scripts could be loaded, and if something went wrong, isolated, without bringing the whole server down. I haven’t used CGI in a long time now, but the configuration experience seems comparable to Mint. It’s mostly setup and ready to run, but still needs tweaks here and there.

But that’s enough to put off some people, even those who would like to move away from, especially, Windows operating systems. It’s unfortunate, but entirely understandable. Most of us just want to push the button, and see something happen.

I should conclude this discussion by making mention of the webmaster — a person, not a team, they were too small for that — at my long gone old web host. I’d often email the support people with questions about some difficulty configuring a CGI script, and he’d respond. My questions must have been too much for the regular support crew (er, duo), and would be forwarded to the guy actually looking after the servers.

He’d send replies at like three o’clock in the morning with suggestions on what to do, which always helped. Remember we’re talking the late nineties here, but this sort of thing said a lot about the earlier days of the web: it often felt like it was all happening during the middle of the night. But emails from the webmaster themselves: that has to be something you’d probably never see today, a hands-on person, instead of a customer service rep, taking the time to help out.

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Building a website is easy: a guide to the first steps

16 October 2024

HTML for people, by American software developer Blake Watson, is a helpful resource for people wishing to build their first website, with a simple text editor. HTML for people guides first time web designers through the process of creating webpages, to uploading them, to produce a live website.

You, my friend, are about to go from zero to internet by putting your very first homemade page on the web. I will let you in on a little secret — websites are just files with text. They don’t require fancy, expensive software to create. You can literally make a website with Notepad. In fact, that’s what we’ll do right now.

It’s literally that simple, and it’s what I did — using Notepad, a simple text editor — way back in the day, to create the first version of disassociated. I was still using NotePad until recently, to create the PHP files here. If you’re on Linux, Mousepad is a simple text editor you could try there.

But even today, you can still comfortably go old-school, and build a website using component HTML files, e.g. an index page, about page, blog page, etc, using a simple text editor, without the need for CMS software, such as WordPress, if you so wanted.

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Jeffrey Zeldman: I stayed, and declined an Automattic severance

8 October 2024

New York City based web designer, standards advocate, founder of A List Apart, and many other things, Jeffrey Zeldman:

I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.

I didn’t know Zeldman worked at Automattic, but I used to read his website/blog every day when I worked as a web designer.

Without getting involved in the WordPress/WP Engine imbroglio, the Automattic severance package seemed quite generous, given it catered for employees who disagreed with the company’s stance. It seems to me dissenting employees anywhere else would simply be shown the door.

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Independent websites: vital for the survival of the hyperlink

3 October 2024

This Halifax Examiner article, by Philip Moscovitch, which features a number of quotes by Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles Times journalist, recorded on a recent episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, has been doing the rounds. The upshot being hyperlinks, links from one webpage to another, are in danger of becoming obsolete. Extinct. Quite unsurprisingly, social media, and some search engines, are among the culprits intent on “degrading” hyperlinks:

There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It’s something that’s kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That’s why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well…

Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging platform, allows hyperlinks to be included in posts at the moment. Whether though they “degrade” them, in X/Twitter style, down the line, remains to be seen. Instagram has never been hyperlink friendly, but remember it started out as a platform for sharing photos, not links.

Not long after I started making websites in the late 1990’s, I read an article about Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web in 1991. The piece is long gone now, but as I recall it, Berners-Lee said when he devised HTML, the markup language used to build websites, he made it intentionally simple to use (though maybe hard to master…). This so information could be shared easily:

However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer working at the CERN research center on the Swiss-French border named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of linked information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Here we are, all these years later, where some people would like to do away with one of the web’s building blocks, which made everything we have today possible in the first place. Go figure. Well, link-haters are gonna hate, and do their best rid their web of hyperlinks, I guess. What this does though is underline the importance of an independent web, and websites that are interlinked by hyperlinks. Continue freely and abundantly sharing those links everyone.

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Personal websites keep the internet fun and real

20 September 2023

The internet felt like an unexplored new frontier when I launched the first iteration of disassociated in 1997. New frontier may seem ornate, trite even, but it was an apt description.

We were feeling our way in the dark, and I’d say most of us were clueless as to what the internet could one day become (although without doubt some people had one or two ideas).

Certainly though today’s internet is worlds removed from that of twenty-five years ago, and being online sometimes feels more like a case of running to stand still.

But it’s not all bad, and at least we still have our personal websites. New York City based creative professional Rachel J. Kwon has put together a collection of blog posts and articles written by publishers of personal websites, who expound the positives of their web presences.

Long may personal websites be with us.

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Does the backwards compatibility of your website extend decades?

19 September 2023

I hate to think exactly how backwards compatible disassociated is. In the past I strived to work with web standards which ensured some uniformity of visual display, regardless of the web browser, or operating platform, being used to view the website. For the most part, but not quite always, disassociated generally worked as intended.

But in my cross-browser testing I really only used a small selection of better known, and recent release, browsers. I always hoped readers were mostly using these, while also keeping them reasonably up to date. As such, I’ve never given any thought as to how disassociated might present in legacy browsers. When I say lagacy, I’m talking apps that were available close to thirty years ago.

Netscape. Internet Explorer 1. Or Lynx, a browser that rendered websites as text only. While it turns out some of these ancient browsers are still available for download, I doubt few people would use them for regular web browsing. And that’s what my limited cross-browser testing regime is based on.

However, in a fascinating experiment, Anthony, a Sydney based software engineer, recently decided to see how far back in time he could take his website, using some of these legacy browsers:

Between pruning container divs and removing collapsed margins the thought occurred to me that my site —with its spartan design and low-tech philosophy— could have remained pretty much identical since the internet’s early days. This raised an interesting question: Exactly how far back in time could my site’s design have remained the same? How far in the past could this site’s current design have originated? 5 years? 10 years? more?

This all sounds like going down a veritable rabbit hole to me. If I saw a display problem with disassociated, on a browser virtually no one was using, I’d probably be tempted to fix the issue, knowing it might take hours to effect. Therefore I’d probably not attempt the exercise in the first place. And even though Anthony ran into a few rendering issues, some of which he found fixes for, overall his website held up well.

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GeoCities, in their gloriously bold colours by Cameron Askin

9 August 2022

For those who came in late, GeoCities was a little like Instagram. Sort. Of. Members signed up for an account, chose a “city” to inhabit based on the content they wished to post, and went about designing a personal website the best way they knew how.

Usually gratuitous quantities gif animations, and sometimes eye-watering combinations of bright (read: garish) colours adorned these websites. For good measure, music, in the form of tinny sounding MIDI files was also the go. And from 1994, until GeoCities was shuttered in 2009, we used to love to hate the GeoCities webpages. They were after all the antithesis of “real” website design, but now they’re gone, we miss them. Sort of maybe.

But Melbourne based web designer Cameron Askin has bought the essence of the old personal websites back to life at Cameron’s World. GeoCities websites may not have always been easy on the eye, but they sure as hell could not be called bland, something you can’t always say of today’s web.

In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction.

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