Building on the idea of an IndieWeb zine - Benjamin Parry
Speaking of zines, I really like Benjamin’s ideas about a web-first indie web zine: using print stylesheets with personal websites to make something tangible but webby.
Link tags: urls
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Your Website’s URLs Can and Should Be Beautiful - Opus
The key to making a beautiful URL is finding a balance between brevity and clarity. In other words, a good URL is short but not so short as to obscure what it’s pointing to. Put another way, a good URL contains enough information about its related resource to be useful, but not so much information that it drags on and becomes unwieldy.
jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet
If you’re thinking of signing up to Hive or Post:
If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Consign that app to oblivion.
(optional.is) Link Rot
Following on from my recently-lost long bet, this is a timely bit of data spelunking from Brian analysing the linkrot of 1400 links over 18 years of time.
How Websites Die ⁑ Wesley’s Notebook
This is like the Gashlycrumb Tinies but for websites:
It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways.
A Long Bet on Link Rot is Resolved, but Questions About the Durability of the Web Still Remain - Long Now
The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:
On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.
A Long Bet Pays Off - Internet Archive Blogs
The bet was been won (not by me, thankfully) and Jason has some thoughts.
On a long bet – A Whole Lotta Nothing
Matt’s thoughts on that bet. Not long now…
11ty/api-indieweb-avatar: Return an optimized avatar image from a domain name input.
Here’s a nifty little service from Zach: pass in a URL and it returns an image of the site’s icon.
Think of it as the indie web alternative to showing Twitter avatars.
marcus.io · Making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page
Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a
/feedspage?
Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.
window.location Cheatsheet - DEV Community 👩💻👨💻
Everything you ever wanted to know about window.location in JavaScript, clearly explained.
The History of the URL
This is a wonderful deep dive into all the parts of a URL:
scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]
There’s a lot of great DNS stuff about the host part:
Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularily given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.
This Page is Designed to Last | CSS-Tricks
I feel there is something beyond the technological that is the real trick to a site that lasts: you need to have some stake in the game. You don’t let your URLs die because you don’t want them to. They matter to you. You’ll tend to them if you have to. They benefit you in some way, so you’re incentivized to keep them around. That’s what makes a page last.
WICG/ScrollToTextFragment: Proposal to allow specifying a text snippet in a URL fragment
It looks (a more complex version of) fragmention might be coming to Chrome.
Slashed URI
This is my kind of URL nerdery. Remy ponders all the permutations of URLs ending with slashes, ending without slashes, ending with with a file extension…
Four Cool URLs - Alex Pounds’ Blog
A fellow URL fetishest!
I love me a well-designed URL scheme—here’s four interesting approaches.
URLs are consumed by machines, but they should be designed for humans. If your URL thinking stops at “uniquely identifies a page” and “good for SEO”, you’re missing out.
“Killing the URL” | CSS-Tricks
URLs are the single greatest feature of the web.
881410 - Incorrect transforms when stripping subdomains
The latest version of Chrome is removing seams by messing with the display of the URL.
This is a bug.
The mysterious case of missing URLs and Google’s AMP | sonniesedge.co.uk
My reaction to that somewhat sensentionalist Wired article was much the same as Charlie’s—seeing it on the same day at the latest AMP sneakiness has me worried.
The hiding of URLs fits perfectly with AMPs preferred method of making sites fast, which is to host them directly on Google’s servers, and to serve them from a Google domain. Hiding the URL from the user then makes a Google AMP site indistinguishable from an ordinary site.
As well as sharing Charlie’s concern, I also share her hope:
I really hope that the people who are part of Google can stop something awful like this from happening.