news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Medium ☛ The Gemini web: a brief intro. Recently I stumbled upon Gemini, a web…
Recently I stumbled upon Gemini, a web protocol with a growing community, and decided to share it with you. In this article I will try to present it so as you can try it. Here’s the outline: [...]
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Torrent Freak ☛ Seekee Browser App is a Magnet for Movie, TV Show, and Anime Pirates
Technically speaking, any modern web browser can stream pirated movies and TV shows, but some make it easier than others. The Seekee app, available on iOS and indirectly on Android, markets itself as a browser with AI capabilities and fast video streaming. The latter stands out, as pirated content is surprisingly easy to find and is organized for optimal viewing pleasure. But at what cost?
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Andre Alves Garzia ☛ RSS doesn't necessarily means firehose
Many feed reading apps and SaaS adopt the river of news paradigm in which news items are presented in reverse chronogical order in a list that is evergrowing. People often use the monicker firehose for this type of UX approach in which the user is flooded with content. I suspect that this became the dominant approach for feed readers as they were closely modeled against popular email clients way back when.
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Declan Chidlow ☛ The Analytics of This Site
I collect some anonymous analytics on my Vale.Rocks. Not because I feel the need to spy on my users every move, but rather because I quite enjoy nerding out about statistics. I love being able to see what country people are showing up from, what devices they’re using, and their browsers. Being able to see view counts tick up also helps my motivation.
I also find it endlessly interesting to go have a look at where people are finding my site. Sometimes I’ll find that one of my posts has ended up in some obscure non-English newsletter, or at other times on some niche forum straight out of the last century. It’s lovely being able to go down little rabbit holes inspecting such cases and to jump into discussions across the net.
I collect referrers, browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, locations, and languages.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Dan Q ☛ Deprecate React
My recent React experience has mostly involved Gutenberg blocks and WordPress theme component. This seemed like an excuse to check that I can wrangle a non-WordPress React stack.
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Bob Monsour ☛ A keystroke to place focus in the search box
Way back in Issue 62 of the 11ty Bundle blog, I had written about I how I had turned on the autofocus parameter for the search functionality for the 11ty Bundle site. The search is powered by Pagefind. I asked the community for feedback as I knew from reading the Pagefind docs that there may be implications for accessibility.
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Terence Eden ☛ Using Tempest Highlight with WordPress
I like to highlight bits of code on my blog. I was using GeSHi - but it has ceased to receive updates and the colours it uses aren't WCAG compliant.
After skimming through a few options, I found Tempest Highlight. It has nearly everything I want in a code highlighter: [...]
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FSFE
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Licensing / Legal
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[Old] James Grimmelmann ☛ How Licenses Learn [PDF]
Open-source licenses are infrastructure that collaborative communities inhabit. These licenses don’t just define the legal terms under which members and outsiders) can use and build on the contributions of others. They also reflect a community’s consensus on the reciprocal obligations that define it as a community. A license is a statement of values, in legally executable form, adapted for daily use.
As such, a license must be designed, much as the software and hardware that open-source developers create. Sometimes an existing license is fit to purpose and can be adopted without extensive discussion. However, often the technical and social needs of a community do not precisely map onto existing licenses, or the community itself is divided about the norms a license should enforce. In these cases of breakdown, the community itself must debate and design its license, using the same social processes it uses to debate and design the other infrastructure it relies on and the final goods it creates.
In this Article, we analyze four case studies of controversy over license design in open-source software and hardware ecosystems. We draw on Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, a study of how physical buildings change over time as they are adapted and repurposed to deal with new circumstances by successive generations of users. Similarly, we describe how open-source licenses are adapted and repurposed by different communities confronting challenges [...]
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