Leftovers Regarding the Web and the Net

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 09, 2026

• Ruben Schade ☛ Using Thunderbird for RSS

  I’ve started using the Thunderbird email client for reading RSS feeds again, and it’s honestly quite great. As opposed to it not honestly being great, which if true, would kind of defeat the point of writing this post.

• University of Toronto ☛ If there are URLs in your HTTP User-Agent, they should exist and work

  One of the things people put in their HTTP User-Agent header for non-browser software is a URL for their software, project, or whatever (I'm all for this). This is a a good thing, because it allows people operating web servers to check out who and what you are and decide for themselves if they're going to allow it. Increasingly (and partly for social reasons), I block many 'generic' User-Agent values that come to my attention, for example through their volume.

• Paywall

  • Tedium ☛ The Art Of The Minimal Paywall

    One of the reasons why companies like Substack have such a strong hold on creators is pretty simple: It’s hard to build a paywall.

    You have to deal with a lot of really hard stuff, like logins and payment methods. And you’re dealing with vendors left and right. Your readers’ passwords get spread around the [Internet] like wildfire, and honestly, do you want to contribute to that?

    And worst part: If you use things like magic links, your readers might find themselves having to log in a dozen times.

• Mozilla

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Memory bit flips cause up to 15% of Firefox crashes, asserts Mozilla engineer — figure inferred from 470,000 auto-submitted crash reports

    A Mozilla engineer has shared survey data and calculations suggesting that up to 15% of Firefox crashes are due to a bit flip.

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

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Two of My Favorite Things Together at Last: Pies and Subdomains

    I don’t care about most of those files. I just want pictures and captions. So I crafted an Origami script that pulls all that data out of the archive and puts it into a single directory: pictures, named by date, with a feed.json file to enumerate all the photos and their captions.

• Smolnet

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: A plug for the Spartan protocol

    About five years ago I posted my views on the relatively-new Gemini protocol. More recently, I posted on what had changed in the last five years. In that later article I alluded briefly to the Spartan protocol, originally published by Michael Lazar. Gemini, Spartan, and others aim to create an alternative, “small” web that is immune to commercial exploitation.