I have fond memories of trying to solve HTML/text-based riddles on sites like WeffRiddles when I was growing up in the mid-late 2000s. The premise of the site is usually pretty simple: the landing page represents "level 1", and you had to find the correct URL to get to level 2, 3, and so on. The "puzzle/riddle" aspect usually involves inspecting the underlying HTML and looking through clues given in the source code, then using those clues to piece together the URL for the next stage.

It was always fun hanging out on forums and sharing clues about how to solve the level that everyone was stuck on. Also, being a kid back then, frankly I felt like a Hackerman™️ whenever I'd have to inspect the page source, paste it into Windows Notepad, then set font size to 1pt because I thought there was an ASCII art pattern hidden in the HTML. Good times.

Sometimes I get the urge to play these things again, but besides WeffRiddles which I know by name, I don't really know what this type of game is called. The closest "modern" example I can think of is /dev/esc, which is more like an online escape room than a long-form riddle site.

Does this ring a bell for you? Any other fun ones that you remember playing? And what the hell do I type into Google to find more of these?

I'm going to be building a simple blog for myself.

Partially I just want something really simple and customizable, and also it will be a fun little programming project.

I'll be using PHP and mySQL for the backend. I won't be using any sort of framework as it shouldn't be necessary for a very simple blog. I'm fairly comfortable with JavaScript.

What I'm imagining is some sort of JavaScript library I can just download, link to my html and then turn a textarea into a simple wysiwyg editor. It could be as simple as a markdown editor or something with a little more features.

It has to be free. Open source would be a plus.

If anyone has any recommendations or advice I would be very grateful. Thanks!

So, I'm a privacy advocate (or paranoiac, depending on your perspective). I run both uMatrix and NoScript plug-ins (among others) in my Firefox browser, so I can see when and where websites send calls out to other locations, and block the ones I want ... google analytics, google fonts, google-apis, google tag manager, and gstatic are all ubiquitous out there, probably 99% of websites use at least one of them (PS: Tildes is in the 1%; yeay, Deimos).

And note ... there may well be nothing at all wrong with any of those sites/services ... but Google has a global all-encompassing Terms and Conditions policy that says, you use anything of Theirs, and They are allowed to harvest your personal data and make money off of it.

And I do not accept those terms.

Okay, that's the prologue. The deal is, I have a small piece of documentation, just basic "how to use this" info, for a WordPress plug-in. It is in .html format, with bundled bootstrap and jquery and a few other assets.

Nothing, anywhere in the entire folder, references gstatic. And yet when I open this local, on-my-computer-only html file ... my browser tells me that it is trying to connect to gstatic.com.

Anyone happen to know why/how that is happening?

Hi,

There's a certain site which hosts media files and has a player that depends on a lot of third-party resources to play, while browsers have native support for those file types. Those 3rd-party resources are often blocked by ad blockers and I have no desire to white-list them. I would like to extract the direct link to the media file and make it playable on my custom web page.

The link to the media file is present in the page source of each page, always on the same line. It's not anchored in HTML but present in the JavaScript for the player, like so:

    $(document).ready(function(){
      $("#jquery_jplayer_1").jPlayer({
        ready: function () {
          $(this).jPlayer("setMedia", {
            [ext]: "https://[domain]/[filename.ext]"
          });
        },

In this example it's on line #5. [ext] = the file extension.

I want to build the following:

• A web page with a form with a single input field meant to receive links from that specific file host
• [Something] that extracts the file link from the source of the host's page
• Present the linked file as playable in an embedded native player

So far I've managed to create a form with an input box and a submit button, but it doesn't do anything yet. What is the best way to build the actual functionality? I know HTML/CSS. I have some rudimentary understanding of JavaScript/jQuery and Python3, so those would be my preferred tools.

For those worried about piracy: The files in question are not copyrighted and I'm not looking to make copies. I just want to make them playable. This is for personal use.

Thank you for reading this far. Any and all advice is welcome!

I am an occasional lynx/elinks user and I only have a single complaint about Tildes that prevents me from reading it using those browsers. Threaded comments don't display properly, since the CSS support of these browsers is non existent (lynx) or poor (elinks), the only way to make threaded comments display nice is by rendering them as ul lists. Is it possible to wrap the current article elements inside ul/li elements to make them display nice in text-only browsers?

For comparison, I can get them to display nice on reddit using the old mobile interface. In Tildes threads look flat (those comments are supposed to be nested, link to original thread) and it is difficult to know who is replying to who.

So I've been having a slightly off-topic discussion on a thread here and figured this would be a good subject to have wider input on.

I don't think markdown adds anything to Tildes and I think it actually degrades the experience for new users. Right now we're mostly old experienced reddit users and mods, but that hopefully will change. To me, markdown adds a not insignificant hurdle to formatting. Markdown has very few uses besides reddit and Github, and even then there's a few different types.

I suggest a WYSIWYG text box with a tabbed HTML option for those who want to use code formatting. Let's use something that's standard and encourages users to learn useful code.

Tell me why I'm wrong Tildes!

Edit: I primarily use mobile, so maybe that's part of the disconnect here. But it seems I'm the only person who cares and still thinks markdown is almost useless. I'm fine being in the minority. I still feel it's a good idea to look beyond the bleeding edge to the time when there's 300,000 or 3,000,000 uses.

Have a good day everyone!