Events, Web Browsers, SSGs, Software Freedom, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 24, 2026

• Events

  • Software Freedom Conservancy ☛ FOSSY 2026 track proposals are open! [Ed: Unsafe?]

    FOSSY 2026 (August 6th – 9th 2026 at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) has opened our call for track proposals!! Our community led tracks have always been a highlight of the conference. Making space for what the community wants to talk about, and fostering discussion around key issues in software freedom is what FOSSY is all about.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Rachel ☛ Another round of reporting on feed readers

    One thing I wanted to note before I get to the list: there are a couple of readers which have apparently added support for the Cache-Control header, and specifically the "max-age=nnnnn" part of it. The test feed sends that out, and I change the values sometimes to see which readers speed up and slow down accordingly. To the authors of those projects: I see you, and I appreciate your work! I'd put a gold star on your laptop if I could. (Not all of them are in this report since they have finished testing and are no longer reporting in.)

    So then, let's talk turkey here. I'm grouping the results by client just for simplicity. Remember that means it includes vastly different config options used by different people, different versions, different upgrade cadences, and (sigh), yes, different amounts of people clicking reload.

  • PolyWolf ☛ Shoutouts To All The RSS Readers

    User-Agents in alphabetical order, marked up with links where applicable: [...]

  • Andrew Chan ☛ Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours

    Obviously lots of things have changed since then. Most bigger, better, faster: CPUs have gotten a lot more cores, spinning disks have been replaced by NVMe solid state drives with near-RAM I/O bandwidth, network pipe widths have exploded, EC2 has gone from a tasting menu of instance types to a whole rolodex's worth, yada yada. But some harder: much more of the web is dynamic, with heavier content too. How has the state of the art changed? Have the bottlenecks shifted, and would it still cost ~$41k to bootstrap your own Google? I wanted to find out, so I built and ran my own web crawler I discussed with Michael Nielsen over email and following precedent, also decided to hold off on publishing the code. Sorry! under similar constraints.

  • Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

    • PolyWolf ☛ So I've Been Thinking About Static Site Generators

      I'm aware of 2 broad classes of SSGs: those written for the authors' personal use which are quirky in interesting ways (a very common topic on lobste.rs), and ones written for a mass audience that are more mellow but flawed in some other way (Jekyll, Hugo, Hakyll, Zola, Astro, & many others). I've dealt with the latter kind for as long as I've had a blog, so it's about time I took a crack at the former.

      This post will go over what I want, which afaik nothing on the market satisfies, and what I plan on doing about that.

  • FSF / Software Freedom

    • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, February 27, starting at 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC)

      Join the FSF and friends on Friday, February 27 from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

    • LWN ☛ GNU Octave 11.1.0 released

      Version

      11.1.0 of the GNU Octave scientific programming language has been

      released.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The Anarcat ☛ Antoine Beaupré: PSA: North america changes time forward soon, Europe next

      This is a copy of an email I used to send internally at work and now made public. I'm not sure I'll make a habit of posting it here, especially not twice a year, unless people really like it.