i am fascinated by this typeface history. as it turns out, Gerald Giampa was the owner of the LTC Spire typeface when it was licensed for use in the GeoWorks operating environment.
i had no idea that he was canadian, and moved his foundry to Prince Edward Island before it was destroyed in a tidal wave. P22 bought his font faces, and designed this absolutely gorgeous traditional web site called The Giampa Tour. it disappeared from the web over 10 years ago, and this is probably the first time it has been seen in a decade. it's full of incredibly nerdy typeface history, including some fantastic rants on how shitty Adobe was to deal with, even back in the late 1980s. 😆
this is what the world wide web was made for, and i'm so glad WBM managed to preserve a working copy, as P22 has been out of business for many years - and its website gone with it.
i've rebuilt the entire site using the WBM's snapshot for public viewing here, where it will remain as an online museum and tribute to Gerald Giampa's incredible work:
This Should be *a huge conversation in the #Fediverse - really.
@jupiter_rowland certainly paraphrases much of the sentiment here in the Fediverse where many conversations are taking place, albeit briefly, and then dismissed, but why? Are people too busy to care? Are people too apathetic to take seriously anything that begins with the letters, masto...? Do those 5 letters really invoke such categorical dismissiveness that cuts into topics that would otherwise likely gain immediate traction were it not for mention of that corporate monolithic silo brand?
Probably; likely; perhaps - take your pick. There is indeed a general apathy amongst especially long term Fedizens and also Lemmy users who are refugees from Reddit, but it's okay to dismiss masto as the neo-corporate EEE platform conceivably threatening the UX for millions of Fedizens. And like it or not, there does need to be a viable shitposting platform, which is exactly what masto is, inhabited in very large ways by people who, as Jupiter raises the question, "are incapable of actually engaging in textual conversation. There's something to that.
Well, #A11Y is a very real concern, perhaps for the FEPs, considering there are projects that are very close in architecture to completely ignoring anything that isn't part of the W3's official specification, and that's okay.
It is, however, a misnomer that one must insert alt-text into media on the masto platform, at least at this juncture. Forcing the hand of refugees from the deprecated, #Privacy_Mining, monolithic silos is yet another complication that those poor souls need to be gently nudged into accepting - but even more importantly, ... "Why".
Some popular Android clients will complain if you try to post media without also including alt-text, some have no facilities at all for doing so. This is an adoption phenomenon, slowly being rolled out, as awareness increases (awareness of the WHY - not the HowTO) with respect to the reasons it is an important design consideration.
Do people actually get unceremoniously banned for not including alt-text for attached media on masto? Yes, On some instances they do, as if it will have any affect at all on the wider Fediverse - I have heard on several occasions that this does indeed happen - there aren't many things that piss people off more than having something that is important to them getting yanked out from underneath them in rug-pull fashion than that of an #instabanhammer, and yet childish, juvenile moderators and admins on several masto instances are truly guilty of such dystopian tyranny and abuse of privilege.
Those types of adversarial, clickish masto instances are much of the reason Fediverse gets a bad rap in some silo social networking circles, and it isn't a fair characterization, but the offensive behavior persists. More than an impetus for the deployment of #smolweb, single-user instances, it is indeed primarily a masto phenomenon.
Not a pretty thing, but masto always has been a caustic cauldron of cacophony of enmity and active vitriol, and that's just one more reason to expedite the outreach programs popping up all over the place to entice the good folks to ditch it in favor of many other good social networking platforms mentioned by Jupiter in his cw-LONG article (I wish he wouldn't bother catering to those mastoblasters with that sentiment, they should at least be smart enough to see that it's more substantive than their shitposting personas are capable of parsing).
Well I'll admit that I stayed up a little bit later than I intended but I managed to hammer it out. Some thoughts on the #indieweb#smolweb#personalsites movement (whatever you want to call it) and, incidentally, the first update to my personal website in 6 months.
I don't know if the world needed another one of these think-pieces but for me, at least, it's a sort of statement of intent. At the very least I hope to put some more effort into my personal site.
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)
Anytime that you click on your browser reader mode you are implicitly admitting, and confirming, that #smolweb and #Gemini are the right way to read internet pages... 🤭
To follow through on my pledge to do more of my #internet reading on the #indieweb, I've been visiting random blogs using this site and adding any interesting ones to an #RSS feed.
My intention is to browse this feed much the same way I would the news -call it a self-care practice. I want to spend more time in reflection and less in panic. I also want to get ideas for, perhaps, my own blog someday.
If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@molly0xfff In short: I prefer a tech/science-content-oriented, slow-paced, low-hype/drama #smolweb, though definitelywith the societal changes in the importance of diversity, representation, etc. Usenet was, I think, relatively good for its time, but in retrospect one can't help but recognize it for the mostly-white, male, academic, elitist club that it obviously was by extension of being very much a university thing... 3/3
I really like personal homepages and have quite a list of them bookmarked. I'll post one every week until I don't or unless I fall behind this schedule. 😉 So here's Cool Personal Homepages #CPH Vol. 14: starbreaker.org https://starbreaker.org/
I have to replace the tool I use to generate static website https://pages.casa
Publii builds a site which does not comply with the #smolweb guidelines.
Choosing Between #Smolweb and #Gemini: Advantages and Drawbacks
In the ever-evolving landscape of decentralized and minimalist web (and net) technologies, two platforms stand out: Smolweb and Gemini, if we forget good old Gopher. Both offer alternatives to traditional web browsing, emphasizing simplicity, speed, and privacy. But which is the right choice for you? [...]
In the vast landscape of the internet, where bloated websites reign supreme, there lies a humble yet powerful movement: the SmolWeb! Embracing simplicity, efficiency, and accessibility, SmolWeb challenges conventional web development practices. If you're a web developer seeking a new perspective, here's why and how you should consider writing SmolWeb sites [...]
I think that it's a good idea to have a look to it, because this design can be fully compatible with #smolweb concept. A bit different from minimalism, a website adopting #Brutalism may be lightweight and with its own singularity.
If you want to build a smolweb site, you should study this concept.
Be careful, some Brutalist templates exist but use heavy framework, avoid them.
A prototype of "smolmd.php" is running on pages.casa.
Next to the classic htdocs directory of the user space, there is a "markdown" directory. If you put .md files in it, they are automatically served through http in html format, building a #smolweb site in the /md/ fake directory of the site.
Last week I found out about the Gemini protocol. It's like a light weight alternative to the web. There is not much to it. Every resource loads only one file. You could compare the experience of browsing it to having reading mode in your browser always on. I like the simplicity of it and the DIY mentality
I worked on a little server for it the over the weekend but there is nothing on it yet so I'll post the link some other time.
I really like personal homepages and have quite a list of them bookmarked. I'll post one every week until I don't. So here's Cool Personal Homepages #CPH Vol. 10: Lost Letters https://lostletters.neocities.org/
It's a static site generator. Unlike many others, Publii is a graphical application, very easy to use. It manages content edition with 3 different methods:
Wysiwyg editor
Block editor (inspired by Medium IHMO)
Markdown editor
Adding images is simple, you can select one as featured for Organic data, put one in the header for the site or for each post.
It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
I really like personal homepages and have quite a list of them bookmarked. I'll post one every week until I don't. So here's Cool Personal Homepages #CPH Vol. 8: j3s.sh https://j3s.sh/