fascinating review of studies on Internet use and cognition — including potentially negative effects on concentration and memory — found by way of an excellent article in Nautilus titled "Viva la library"
@molly0xfff I was reading it on my phone and managed to get through it without task switching, but not for lack of attempts by my phone to distract me! I was feeling proud of myself for getting almost to the end without even thinking about task switching when 2 text message notifications came in 😅 Under normal circumstances I would have opened them, but I thought better of it given what I had just read
@molly0xfff It's possible by setting a unicode character (fallback) in the CSS content, then style it with a custom webfont (e.g. convert the SVG with IcoMoon).
That's how I manage such link indicators in my personal website, although I move them to the right gutter instead of inline. Example: https://heracl.es/geary/
The difference between versus an SVG is negligible. Of course, opinions may vary between what's good practice between icon fonts and SVGs.
Many yearn for the "good old days" of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
@molly0xfff ISPs however have slowly, gradually minimized what people get when they get an internet account.. shell accounts are gone, usenet is gone, in most cases a little bit of storage for your own website/webblog is gone, self-hosting at home is still a privacy nightmare, and hosting your own weblog via a community cloud like Tor or i2P isn't common yet.. yes we should do as you suggest but how we get there is the question
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 websites maintained by experts on a topic, using space provided by their ISP or institution, without any monetization or tracking. Also, the prevalence of text, and a view that any serious website would not clutter the screen with animations and autoplay video (even though unserious ones always did).
@molly0xfff Websurfing! The ability to jump from link to link as topics interest me!
That's the one thing which to me feels like it really has disappeared. Even on blogs, its rare for me to find them linking the concepts they discuss, & if they do its to previous articles of theirs.
Wikipedia seems to be the last bastion of it! Though that's also internal links.
I try to make up for this, give my readers a taste of what I miss. But that just informs me of how difficult linkifying is!
silver lining: it was awfully thoughtful of all these boston college administrations to draw the attention of a group of young, energetic, politically active students to last year's "tent ordinance" that cruelly targets the unhoused and is now being used to crack down on speech
On unexpected signup waves: "Then something would happen, and thousands of users suddenly joined. We started referring to these days as EMEs (Elon Musk Events) because they were normally precipitated by some change on Twitter."
"While more of the #web is becoming accessible to people with low-end connections, more of the web is becoming inaccessible to people with low-end devices even if they have high-end connections."
@molly0xfff@danluu in my case i tend to avoid the heavy website because "strangely" they also the one with most of "tracker / ads" that break them with adblock.
I don't mind to pay high quality website ... if their website are also high quality and not one more wordpress over-bloated with 3 hundreds module and an heavy theme with 30 animation on each clic.
@masta@molly0xfff
I just want every text block to open up my favorite text editor for entering the text. You could choose a different one. I was working on designing a GUI and program interaction system decades ago, like when Sun Window System and X Windows were new, that would have made this easy to do. Sadly other things got in the way. ...
@masta@molly0xfff ... Every program had two parts. The program that did the work, and/or controlled other programs to do the work. The other part is the user interfaces. Programs could have multiple different UIs. Some could be command line text, while others graphical. They could even be optimized for local versus remote over the net operation.