Here’s another roundup of changes that I’ve made recently on the site:

  • The obvious colour scheme change, as inspired by the old Fashion Days design, as I explained in this quickie. I’ll probably leave it on until the end of August, but I’m looking into a way of making it toggle-able.
  • Posts that get updated (looking at you Chrome Extensions), now get a mark in the “everything” page. Update: and get bumped in the post list. Not on the homepage though.
  • I’ve decided to drop some backwards compatibility features, especially SVG backgrounds. While the site is buggy on older Internet Explorer browsers, it’s still somewhat readable.
  • Replaced the display of “> –” with a ▸ in bundles/series titles in archive pages.
  • I was considering to use an invidious instance to display all the youtube embeds, but decided to keep all embeds on youtube-nocookie.com because using invidious I encountered more issues than I’d like to care about, including but not limited to:
    • These are highly unreliable and even with normal browsing, I needed to refresh several times to properly get a video on 20% of the cases.
    • Sometimes instances just completely die and having to switch instance over and over becomes cumbersome
    • The argument of “Bad Google gets your data” is irrelevant, as requests to the video files themselves are still sent directly to Google
    • Even though I made a script to pull all the youtube video IDs I have in the content directory of the site and download the video files, I don’t have the processing power of hosting locally and properly serving said videos (they are currently about 185GB)
  • I also considered removing Javascript code from the website, but I’m using only 100KB of JS, including the jQuery library, but I’ve did some improvements on browsing the site with Javascript disabled. There are still some things that need to be reworked or that will never work:
    • Zoom photos / opening them in new windows.
    • Safonts Webring widget
    • Webrings’ “random site” button. Except for geekring (which is server-side), none of the webrings have a non-JS based random site feature.
    • Videos player in the Concert videos page. However, you can click on the button and the clip should play in a new tab/window or start the download of the file.
    • Records “shuffle” button. As the shuffle page is JS-based, this will never work unless I do something server-side. Which I won’t.
  • Increased the number of concerts and movies on the homepage fron 6 to 8.
  • Increased the number of records on the homepage fron 6 to 9.