This looks cool: Mozilla has released a translation tool as an add-on for Firefox that can do web page translation locally instead of sending data to the cloud! It’s based on Project Bergamot and implemented in WebAssembly.
IMO translation is one of those things like speech recognition that ideally should have always have been local (for obvious privacy reasons), but the processing and data just wasn’t there yet when Google Translate and similar services launched.
In response to girrodocus’s question: #PersonalWebsite creators… what’s your rationale for deciding when to use a subdomain or a subdirectory?
I usually prefer to put sections in subdirectories. That makes it possible to make the entire site portable (depending on authoring tools, anyway). Ideally, I want something that could be zipped up and moved. Or sent to Archive Team. (One of the downsides of dynamic site generators is that you can’t do this.)
When I use subdomains, it’s typically because I want some sort of isolation between the content, or the server apps, etc. But in those cases I’m as likely to use another domain entirely.
I originally put my main blog in a subdirectory (/journal), but if I set up my own git repository or something like that, I’d probably put it in a subdomain.
That said, I’m currently trying to sort out what I want to keep at the domain I’ve had for the last 20 years and what to move to my IndieWeb identity site.
It took 4 or 5 years from me discovering IndieWeb to actually building support into my website(s), because Hyperborea.org, named after a fictional place, felt like a digital home, but not an identity. So I set up KVibber.com as my digital identity instead.
I’ve been considering several approaches:
I might move my scenic and nature photos over to KVibber but leave the funny and comic-con photos on Hyperborea, or move my tech articles over but leave the personal posts.
I’m also planning to put together a light microblog to be the canonical location for short posts on Mastodon/Twitter/etc that I want to keep, but don’t feel big enough for a full blog entry. That’ll probably go on KVibber, even though it’ll blur the pro/fun and original/fan distinctions.
Originally on Wandering.shop.
Update September 2022: I’ve tabled the whole question at this point. For now, I’m just using KVibber as a profile page and putting everything else on Hyperborea, like I was doing before.
Update April 2026: I’ve been moving stuff over to KVibber, and put the blog on a subdomain because subfolders have .well_known problems.
One of the things I find fascinating about the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk impacts is that in one case it took decades of scientific research and multiple theories to settle on what probably caused it, while in the other we have video footage and the actual meteorite.
But there were eyewitnesses to Tunguska despite its remoteness, and somehow I’d never read their reports before.
As for the debate about what caused the Tunguska event: it was clearly something from space, but no one has ever found an impact crater or an actual meteorite, just damaged forest. Plus the scientific expeditions weren’t carried out until years later. Current consensus is that it was a meteor, but it exploded in the air before impact, causing the visible fireball across the sky, intense heat, shock waves, atmospheric disturbances and so on but no crater.
Two hot takes (so to speak):
Auto-updaters shouldn’t run when the system is really busy.
And installers that check to see the whether the same or newer version is “already installed” should either be really thorough about what they’re checking, or offer to do a repair install anyway.
I’d fired up a game of No Man’s Sky, which even after redoing the thermal paste and adding another case fan still pushes the limits of my system’s cooling, especially if I forget to wait for all the background processes to finish loading on Windows startup. I left a space station, landed on a planet, started mucking around with the structure I had found, and hit a waypoint pole to save again—
And the system shut down.
I turned it back on to get the fans running again and help cool off. Which worked. But when I logged in, I had a bunch of errors with Google Drive. Apparently its auto-update launched during my GPU-intensive game and overheated it enough to reach the shutdown threshold.
Fortunately, I’d just saved my game — or so I thought.
I spent about half an hour trying to fix Google Drive before I decided to just go back to the game for now.
No Man’s Sky picked up seamlessly…at the previous save. Maybe the write cache hadn’t been flushed yet or something. I’m glad I only lost about a minute of gameplay, though… I’ve got several hundred hours on this save file, and I’d hate for it to get lost or corrupted!
Anyway, back to Google Drive. I couldn’t reinstall it because I couldn’t uninstall it, and despite my efforts I couldn’t remove enough traces of it for the installer to be willing to run. You can read the whole reinstalling Drive saga on my troubleshooting site, along with the taskbar that lost its icons halfway through.
I eventually fixed it by copying the installed program files from another system and running the uninstaller manually. That resolved both the taskbar icons and the Drive installer being willing to run.
Then I dragged myself into bed.
Yeah, it was a fun Saturday night. 🙄
For human-readable HTML, I can write:
<a href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>
For machine-readable HTML:
<a rel="author" href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>
For IndieWeb microformats:
<a class="p-author h-card" href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>
But for inline Schema.org I have to write:
<span property="author" typeof="person"><a property="url" href="https://example.com"><span property="name">Lois Lane</span></a>
I’ve been grumbling about all the redundancy in putting multiple sets of metadata on a page: classic meta tags, OpenGraph, Twitter cards, Schema.org, microformats2. So I’ve been looking to consolidate as much as I can.
I thought, Hey, Schema.org has inline markup implementations! I can probably just tag the same elements I used for microformats2!
But there are so many things like author where it wants a multi-part hierarchy when you could easily use a single tag.
At this point the added complexity to the code isn’t worth it. I may as well stick with the JSON-LD lump of text in the header. Heck, the extra spans and divs might actually add up to more bytes than the no-longer-duplicated content.
It’s not actually that much extra space, though, and the site in question generates all the markup from one set of markdown front matter. It just bugs me that to fill in all of them I need multiple copies of everything.
Though it is kind of funny to compare design decisions:
Facebook: We want a single block that can be copied and pasted and all looks the same. We don’t want to reuse existing tags and we don’t care about DRY.
IndieWeb: Invisible metadata inevitably gets out of date, and all this stuff that should already be on the page or in the head anyway, so let’s use what’s there and make it simple to mark up the actual page content.
Schema.org: CATEGORIZE ALLLLL THE THINGS!!!!!
A few weeks ago, Szczezuja asked the GeminiSpace community: How you were using the Internet in 1991-1995 and 1995-2005?
This may be a bit longer than asked for, and I thought about breaking it into smaller pieces, but I decided it would be more appropriate for a Gemini post to be one single unit.
By 1990 my family had moved on from Atari’s home computer line to what was then known as an “IBM Compatible” PC. I missed out on the BBS era, except for one time we had to download a software patch. My first taste of being online came through walled gardens during my last year of high school:
Prodigy, which I seem to remember having a GUI frame around a mostly text interface (except for banner ads in the frame). I think it even ran under DOS. I remember looking at some message boards about theater, but that’s about it.
AOL, which at the time was much friendlier to use, ran on Windows, and had its own system of message boards, email, etc. But again I don’t remember much about what I did with it until later on.
Then I got to college and discovered “Mosaic” at the computer labs. This web thing was really cool! There was a database of movies that I could search, I could find all kinds of sites on this collection of categorized links called Yahoo!, and people were posting things like fan pages collecting all of the Animaniacs cultural references!
Egad! Keeper’s Cartoon Files is still online!
There was a campus-wide Unix network that you could connect to through a dial-up terminal app, or the WYSE terminals scattered around campus. Windows and/or Mac computer labs at major departments. The engineering, computer science, etc. labs also had bullpens full of graphical UNIX terminals (I think they were the classic Sparc “pizza boxes” running SunOS and later Solaris), which was how I first encountered Mosaic and Netscape.
Back at my dorm, though, I had to dial up to a terminal. I could use text-based applications like Lynx for web browsing, or PINE for email. Sometimes I’d check my email (a string of auto-generated letters and numbers based on my major at a fourth-level domain based on the department that handled student email) at a text-based terminal in one of the computer labs or scattered around campus.
I’m not ready to give up on the flexibility of WordPress for my main blog yet, but holy crap are these pages heavy. Even with compression. There’s no reason it should take 450K (before compression) and 20 requests to display a 500-word post.
And I don’t even do ads, popups, social sharing buttons or anything else like that.
By contrast, my Les Mis blog, where I post about once a year, is currently generated by Eleventy using a custom minimal theme that only takes around 10K of HTML, 3K CSS, and a third request for the icon. And another 40K for the header font, which I recently set up locally so it no longer has to call out to Google Fonts.
One domain, just four requests, and only 50K for the first hit and 10K for each subsequent page.
Never mind the Gemini version of the blog which is around 2-5K per page and a single request per page!
Compression cuts down on those 500Kb WordPress pages — all the text and code compresses really well so only around 200K bandwidth is needed. But it’s still got multiple JavaScript and CSS requests going on.
I was able to cut it down significantly by switching to a lighter theme and turning on the minimize/combine feature in WP-Optimize so it’s making fewer script calls. But it’s still way bigger than the minimalist setup I have with 11ty.
Some of it is images, though. I still have my latest Flickr posts in the sidebar, and I’m using Jetpack’s related posts feature which includes thumbnails. I could cut out a big chunk by removing those, but I kind of still like the idea of having them in there.
I think I need to take a look at how much extra stuff I really want on this site and rip some of it out. Eventually I’d like to replace all the JetPack features because they just seem to keep adding more scripts. Plus I want an entirely local stats package instead of one that’s offloaded to a third party even if they’re less awful than, say, Google or Facebook.
On the other hand, I want to keep Gravatar on the comments sections (on the older posts where people actually commented) because that’s actually useful to readers as an aid for following a conversation better. But that’s all on top of the base page size.
