dammIT

A rantbox

#web Articles


Admonitions, or how to box heads-ups

As of about 15 minutes ago, I finally have styled admonitions here at dammIT HQ. If you are unsure about what those are, you might have seen them in the wild but just didn't know their name. Behold: Warning Note that this code is 100% organically grown at home and …

Why Everyone Needs a Blog

The easiest way to see how much you need a blog is to do this thought exercise. Imagine going back in time to a 21-year-old in 1952 and asking them what their opinions are, and where you could find a book of those opinions. Here’s what they would say …
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Mobile blogging

Today I cloned the dammit.nl repo on my phone, as apparently I hadn't done that just yet. I had wanted to post a short blurp on December 31th saying goodbye to 2021, but I was fresh out of laptop. I put it on my phone mostly to be able …

Do it, do it now

I stumbled upon this post by Vermyndax earlier today and felt the urge to type. His problem is one that I'm familiar with; I don't pretend to have a magic answer, but I learned some tricks to get myself started. First of all: I don't think it's weird to want …
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The Pocket Challenge

Recently I installed a new, unofficial Nexus 7 2013 ROM on my trusty old handheld. It practically revived the device for me, as previously it was crashing in a repeated way and I thought it was finally done with its (notoriously iffy) flash storage. Now it runs the latest version …
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The ineffectiveness of lonely icons

If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience. You should not assume icons or UI elements are known to your users, as …

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

When I described the Responsible AI team’s work to other experts on AI ethics and human rights, they noted the incongruity between the problems it was tackling and those, like misinformation, for which Facebook is most notorious. “This seems to be so oddly removed from Facebook as a product …
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A question about statically generated websites

When I made a remark that my commenting system is working again, a reader asked a simple enough question: how does one build a site like this? I realised there is no simple answer to this. Well, there is, but it takes a bunch of knowledge (and skills) one has …

isso comments are up again

Commenting had been broken since the 19th of December because of the host having upgraded to Python 3.9 and isso breaking. I tried installing it anew from pip, but there is still a really old version on there; installing it as egg directly from its Git repository1 kind …



About feeds (RSS, Atom)

Use web feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place. Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. You get the latest content …

Disabled all the analytics

For years I've had Google Analytics and a self-hosted Piwik/Matomo instance to keep track of visitors. Fun fact: I barely ever looked at the stats. Other fun fact: my own presence did not even register, as my adblocker denied the requests to both. Yeah. It wasn't a really hard …
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dammIT alchemy

Today I've been busy with a family party and with a total restyle of this weblog based on Pelican Alchemy Bootstrap 4 and the Bootswatch Lux theme, with my own twist in dark-ish grey. Currently it is generating from my own fork with isso comment support and article images. Breakage …

Receive Sentry messages as Telegram notifications

To be able to receive Sentry notifications on Telegram (without using the plugin which only works in the self-hosted Sentry server), one can use webhooks. As I have webhaak to ducttape together webhook all the things, I created a script to send messages to our dev chat, filtering away some …

webhaak all the things

If you're not using webhooks yet to automate things from automatically generating documentation, running tests, updating websites and web applications based on events, please go read up on them. In the meanwhile, I've basically hooked up all my personal projects based on webhooks in GitHub and gitea, powered by my …
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Git-based versioning

So you have this (web) application and you are growing a bit tired of having to manually bump the version number it tells to its users. Also, you would like to see if you are using an up-to-date edition of said app. Enter your Git repository. When you are running …

Online life enhancer, edition 1

Today I want to talk to you about the web and how it sometimes sucks. At least, the experience can suck a bit, especially when it is not open enough so you can set things to your own hands. Take for example YouTube, where overlays can ruin the end of …
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