I'm a huge fan of lightweight sites. They load super fast on mobile and that's the most important thing for me. I found a number of outdated lists online and wanted to hear what your favourites are.

Here is my list.

News

https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org/
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news/canada/toronto?sort=editors-picks
http://68k.news/
https://legiblenews.com/
https://www.skinnyguardian.xyz/
https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/
http://skimfeed.com/
https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/text/textedition

Edit

• Lots to think about, thank you everyone!

In the 2000s, I had Blogger or a subdomain on some random free host. I even tried Ning at some point.

Since 2012, I’ve had a personal site at a custom domain, on Squarespace, then WordPress who knows where, then Tumblr, then WordPress on Linode, now a combo Bear Blog and GitHub Pages.

I dislike WordPress for how clunky it is, Squarespace for how expensive it is, Tumblr for how obviously Tumblr it is (I could say the same about Squarespace and many WordPress sites), GitHub Pages for making me use git to post. Basically, I’m not happy with anything.

So I thought I’d ask los Tildeños—do you have a personal site? What web host and tech stack are you using for it? What do you like/dislike about it? What else have you tried?

Most of the world seems to be settled around Chrome and Safari these days. I remember using Firefox a long time ago myself but then everyone started switching to Chrome and that also turned out to be a natural path of least resistance for web developers like me who had to test web apps in local environment.

This switch happened in circa 2015-16 if I recall correctly, many other browsers have evolved since then and people are looking at alternatives. The Android Kiwi browser, for example, is a great alternative for power users on mobile who need plugins but Chrome won't allow that. Other alternatives have evolved too like Brendan Eich's Brave browser which seems to be promising. Anyone here tried that yet?

I have half a mind to go back to Firefox but I recently learned about how Mozilla Corp is also funded by Google and that turned me off. Wouldn't you rather want to deal with the Devil directly instead of the Devil's assistant or sidekick!

And then there are also those who use Garibaldi, Midori, etc. but I can't go that purist way. I'm way too dependent on the digital way of life and sites like amazon and flipkart won't work in those browsers. What do you think should be the right path ahead from here?

Yesterday, Adsense support sent an email to their users regarding their upcoming policy changes. This primarily affects how subdomains are monetized. Going forward, your subdomains inside the primary domains in the "Sites" section (www, etc.) won't be allowed, any existing ones will be removed and their rules will be merged with the primary domain (such as example.com).

Furthermore, what constitutes a "Site" will also change henceforth. You can only add a primary domain (such as example.com) and the subdomains which are listed on the public suffix list (such as github.io, blogspot.com, etc.). Thus, your own subdomains (such as xyz.example.com or www.example.com) won't be allowed in Adsense.

I don't know what they will achieve by doing this considering they already vet and audit each site before approving them for adsense? In any case, other alternatives to Adsense exist such as Propeller Ads, CJ Affiliate, etc. for those affected by this move but I don't know their efficacy.

I happen to host my blog https://prahladyeri.github.io/blog statically, built using Pelican and served on Github Pages. Plebs like us can't afford a backend server infrastructure, so we must rely on external services like Disqus for comment hosting.

So far, Disqus was the only fellow in town who allowed us to host comments on a free plan. Though there were some issues (bloat, adware, etc.), people seemed to be generally happy with it so far.

But now, a new fellow named giscus commenting system has entered the town, it's basically powered by github. Since I already host my blog on github pages, this should be a natural choice for me, right? Many bloggers seem to be migrating to this new system and I might too soon. The downsides however are as follows:

1. It won't allow me to export existing comments from the old disqus system. Understandable to an extent as those exact author usernames may not be on the Github platform?
2. Disqus interface seems to have improved all of a sudden in last few days! There no longer seem to be any ad and even the comment interface seems to be less heavy or cluttered now. It might sound a bit conspiratorial in nature but could this be the result of rising competition in the form of Giscus!

I'm a lazy status-quoist by nature and might well end up retaining disqus if they don't deviate too much from where they are now. But I'll keep an eye out on Giscus too and its progress. What do you guys suggest?

Today I was doing some paywall hopping and wondered why there wasn't a 12ft.io bookmarklet to make it a little easier.

So I whipped up this little 5 second bookmarklet for anyone who hasn't bothered to do it themselves yet.

Just make a bookmark with the code snippet below as the URL.

javascript: (() => { window.location.replace("https://12ft.io/" + window.location.href)})();

I tried to make a link here that could be dragged and dropped directly into a bookmark bar, but it's disallowed.

There was a very brief period of time in the late 90s early 00s when the word “webcam” had just started existing and entering the popular discourse; and where that word was practically synonymous with “sex show”.

I think around the time I first heard that word, having a webcam usually meant you would use it to do nude shows with.

They weren’t integrated with computers back then (laptops were super expensive and not popular yet, and they weren’t a mainstream laptop accessory until way later). So if you had a webcam, you had to really seek it out and pay quite a bit of money for it. It made little sense for people to buy them just to use them for personal reasons and most jobs didn’t have a utility for them.

… except sex work. Live, paid access cam shows immediately caught on. And people would see those in ads (ads tended to be trashy with zero quality control back then, even automated. Worse than now, I swear), and associate “webcam” with “webcam show”.

There was no reason to otherwise hook up a camera to a computer if not to stream its contents to the web, anyway. The first webcam, that famous coffee pot, was just that: a web-connected camera. Web cam. Wikipedia talks about “Jenni cam” — I wasn’t on the anglosphere’s internet at the time so this escaped me, but it does seem to agree that the concept entered the mainstream not via videoconferencing, but via cam girls.