Kitten now has a lovely new multi-page Settings screen and… drumroll… a new 🐢 interactive shell (REPL) for you to play with the running state of your Small Web site/app/place and debug your app, inspect/manipulate its database, etc.
I plan on recording demos of each of them tomorrow but you can play with them now.
And here’s a little tutorial to get you started with the shell:
「 I am proudly introducing the first Omake on this site: User Friendly Archive. This adds over 5000 subpages, so I am now a webmaster of a significant website. 」
How do you make a modern website? Like this. No JavaScript, no databases, no frameworks. Just plain, simple, accessible, and fast HTML. You’d be surprised what you can get for $5/month.
Also, not immediately relevant to your current issue but something that might be worth considering for the future: using the htmx websocket extension, you can basically implement a streaming HTML approach (example using Kitten: https://ar.al/2024/03/08/streaming-html/) where you can just stream errors to the page as they happen.
Sitting outside on a rare sunny day at a lovely pub in Bray, refactoring Kitten* to pull out the settings page sections into their own pages (and use Kitten’s new Streaming HTML workflow**) and enjoying a yummy pint of Tundra IPA.
The Evergreen Web section in Kitten’s¹ settings now has its own page too (and uses Kitten’s new Streaming HTML² workflow).
If you have the previous version of your site up somewhere, you can use the 404-to-307 technique³ to forward missing pages to your old site so as not to break the Web.
“The simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.” — Jarrett Fuller
I'm at an odd place with my personal website. Before Dec. 2023, it was a "professional portfolio" for my compositions. Now that I'm interested in the IndieWeb community, I want to make something more personal. I don't think I want to make two sites, but I do still need a portfolio for my composition work.
I just read @maggie's post on "digital gardens" and I really like that idea. (1/n)
I definitely want to add more pages, and once I add dropdowns within the menus, that'll be easier to organize. My main thing is that I don't know how to strike a balance of "personal" and "portfolio" in the content I put on my site.
Does anyone else have experience/thoughts on this? (2/2)
Lots to do yet but the new Kitten¹ settings section (that’s common to all Kitten apps / Small Web places) is coming along nicely. (With the general style/layout borrowed from Domain².)
(It’s currently a single page and I’m breaking it up into multiple ones because it’s time.)
Once I’m done with this I should really record a screencast of Kitten’s new backup and restore feature/data portability.
Links pages and blogrolls were once building blocks of online communities of likeminded people, but began vanishing about fifteen years ago. But, along with a resurgent interest in personal websites, blogrolls are making a comeback, at least in indie and small web corners of the web.
I've just reactivated mine, after a long, long absence:
It uses the latest version of JSDB (5.1.3) which fixes an issue where instances of EventEmitter subclasses persisted to the database were erroneously persisting their (by convention private) _events arrays containing AsyncFunction instances and thereby causing a crash on the database open attempt when the AsyncFunction class could not be found as it wasn’t provided to the JSDB.open() method.
… JSDB, by the way, is short for JavaScript Database, which is, umm, a JavaScript database.
It’s an in-process, in-memory database for Node.js for Small Web use that persists to an append-only JavaScript – not JSON, JavaScript – transaction log.
JSDB’s very easy to work with because you just use native JavaScript objects and they just automatically get persisted for you.
e.g., Here’s a quick 6-line Kitten app that persists a counter:
If you’re frustrated about what the online world has become, and you remember “the good old days” with nostalgia (rightly or wrongly), and you despair about our collective ability to find a way forward, this by @molly0xfff offers an important perspective. With reason for hope. She has become an essential voice, along with @pluralistic and Jaron Lanier.