Stuff about the world wide web (WWW): Structure, history, weirdness.
I like the Garamond font. This website uses it. Here’s how:
@font-face {
font-family: 'Garamond';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
src: local('Garamond'), local('GaramondNo8'), local('EB Garamond'), local('EBGaramond'), url(https://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/ebgaramond/v4/kYZt1bJ8UsGAPRGnkXPeFdIh4imgI8P11RFo6YPCPC0.woff) format('woff');
}
body, rss {
font-family: Garamond, serif;
font-size: 16pt;
line-height: 20pt;
margin:1em 3em;
padding:0;
}As you can see, if you have a font called Garamond, Garamond No. 8 or EB Garamond installed, then the web page will use it. Garamond No. 8 is what I use on my GNU/Linux system. If you don’t have any of them, it will download the EB Garamond files from Google Web Fonts.
I hope it works. Thoughts?
Tags: Web 
Google Reader is being axed. I used it every day.
I might consider it. Years ago, I used rss2email by Aaron Swartz. The irony is that I’ll be reading my blog posts—in Gmail! 
There are other alternatives. Here’s a crowdsourced list. I see that The Old Reader, for example. “It’s just like the old Google reader, only better.” Here’s a warning sign, however: “We’re in beta right now […]” Will it cost money eventually? How much? I’m not opposed to paying a little money. After all, I want the service to have a future.
So, run a network service under my own control, or pay somebody else…
As for running something under my own control, I must confess that I’m still averse to running PHP and MySQL on a server of mine. Somehow I keep thinking of the combination as insecure. I downloaded Tiny Tiny RSS and looked at it (also on GitHub).
There is also something about RSS that makes me cringe: If every blog reader installs a feed aggregator that checks its feeds every ten minutes, this won’t scale. A few central aggregators that poll feeds and serve their user interface when requested by users seems like a better solution from a technical point of view.
On my portable devices I’m using the Reeder app. Like many others, it depends on Google Reader. We’ll see what its creator will switch to.
Tags: Web 
Comments on 2013-03-14 Google Reader Alternative
greywulf I’m looking at both The Old Reader and NetVibes as alternatives. Like many people, I stopped using Google Reader itself to read my Google feeds long ago - on my Desktop I use Nextgen Reader for Windows 8 and I use Flipboard on my Android phone. Killing Google Reader effectively kills those apps dead unless they switch to an alternative API provider, and quick. I am guessing that NetVibes will pick up a lot of the slack and reach out to the Google Reader ecosystem.
– greywulf 2013-03-14 10:48 UTC
AlexSchroeder Hm, there’s definitely a difference between API providers and actual user interface providers.
I wonder… I must say that The Old Reader has a certain nostalgia going for it, haha.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-03-14 11:20 UTC
Josh Tolle This means I will either convert over to gwene (and consume through a news reader) or I’ll write something for myself. I’m leaning toward writing something.
– Josh Tolle 2013-03-14 12:47 UTC
AlexSchroeder Wow, gwene looks interesting. It appeals to my Emacs and Gnus sensibilities.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite solve the “reading from multiple devices” problem. I’d also have to find an iOS app that uses NNTP.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-03-14 12:58 UTC
aaditya For an online reader I’ve been pretty happy with newsblur.com
– aaditya 2013-03-16 06:37 UTC
AlexSchroeder Hm, TT RSS apparently has an iPhone and iPad app that allows offline reading. [time passes] Actually, now that I’m looking for it, I can’t find it. I guess it’s vapor ware.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-03-16 16:02 UTC
AlexSchroeder I must admit that reading Three Months to Scale NewsBlur made me feel very sympathetic. I also like that it’s free software. Good call, @aadis. Also, “60,000 new users (from 50,000 users originally).” 
– AlexSchroeder 2013-03-18 08:47 UTC
Ellen Paul Lovers of information now seem to have a tough time with the recent announcement of the closing down of Google reader. However, fans of Google reader can now switch to something new alternatives to Google Reader. I came to across here, http://how-to.in/best-alternatives-for-google-reader/, with list of some alternatives of it, but still can’t decide that with whom should I go for best result. Now, here its a brief description about some other alternatives, so now its not a very much difficult task for me. Thanks for helping out on above topic.
– Ellen Paul 2013-03-22 06:17 UTC
I’m slowly, very slowly, preparing for the separation of Emacs Wiki and my own web presence (this site). Where as Emacs Wiki runs on ThinkMo.de in Germany with excellent uptime costing $20/month, most of my other projects run on Eggplant Farms in the United States. All the old links should still work—I’m a strong believer in Cool URIs don’t change. Just don’t be surprised if you’re being redirected from emacswiki.org/alex to alexschroeder.ch. 
Let me know if you spot anything that doesn’t work: broken links, missing icons, error messages.
Tags: Web 
In the anonymous rant The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later, the author claims “The biggest problem is that it is insecure. […] Anyone can edit any of the pages that contain Elisp code.” The same sentiment was expressed by Alex Bennée in a comment on Google+: “What is really needed is a way to be sure that the source for the emacs extension your updating hasn’t been subverted by someone else with ill intent.”
I said:
Experiences and ideas of “what is really necessary” vary. As for myself, I’ve installed code from all over the Internet without reviewing the source. Installing it from a gist or git repo is hardly a different experience. If you want to figure out whether a source is trustworthy, you do the usual things: do people link to the code, how long has it been around, what about recent checkins, that sort of thing. Or you get into the crypto business of signing releases.
You could of course say that every day that passes without a problem increases our false sense of security… I have no answer to that. All I can say is that if security is your problem, using gists and github is not the solution (as you say yourself). The source of the insecurity is our habits, our culture of downloading and installing anything and everything. I’m not sure how you’ll ever make sure “that the source for the emacs extension your updating hasn’t been subverted by someone else with ill intent.” That seems pretty impossible to me unless you limit yourself to the core Emacs distribution (and even that’s not a guarantee).
People on the #emacs channel keep asking “is there way to do X” and thus my impression is that finding stuff is a more pressing problem. I feel that encouraging people to create a page on the wiki saying “here is code to help you do something” is the solution to that problem.
But then again, I guess we all differ in what we consider to be the most pressing problem.
Alex Bennée the correctly points out that using “a user locked solution like a gist or git repo you can at least be assured what you’re installing has come through one person who you’ve trusted to a degree before.” I guess that’s true. We’ll see whether people start switching over to using gists instead of editing wiki pages. I said in an earlier comment:
I added gist support […] because it was easy to do, not because it will encourage existing authors to move their elisp code on wiki pages to github. If at all, it might encourage future elisp authors to transclude a gist… But then again, there’s nothing preventing them from linking to a gist right now. Perhaps it’s also a generational thing. People that have been living without github and gists don’t feel a particular need to start using it.
Interesting times. 
Comments on 2013-01-23 Security of Code Downloaded from Online Sources
Hi Alex,
first of all - thank you very much for Oddmuse! I’m using it for both my personal site and Department's site. It has some rough edges, but overall I find it a very nice tool, and I did recommend it to a few people.
Now to the point: I was just wondering whether it might be a good idea to use stackoverflow with [emacs] tag (which you mentioned in your earlier post), or maybe even start something like emacs.stackexchange.com? I’m not sure whether it could solve any problems you mentioned, but (at least for the more paranoia-oriented people) it might feel a bit more secure, with all the comments, up- and downvotes etc. I don’t know. (Personally, I didn’t use any actual code from Emacswiki, but I guess it would not be a huge problem for me.)
– mbork 2013-01-23 20:55 UTC
AaronHawley Nothing has really changed. Previously, Lisp code was shared between a few Emacs hackers and the intention was to work on improving it and get it integrated into Emacs. The GNU Project was the trusted authority. They distributed the useful contributions. Obviously, that hasn’t scaled well. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Emacs newbies to distrust code they can’t read that was written by hackers they don’t know.
– AaronHawley 2013-01-23 21:56 UTC
AlexSchroeder Thank you for the kind words, Marcin. I think a lot of people are already using Stackoverflow for Emacs questions. I find the site incredibly useful when I’m at work (except my work is hardly ever related to Emacs, unfortunately).
I also agree with Aaron. Good point regarding the GNU Project being the trusted authority.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-01-23 22:39 UTC
Thomas Koch I’ve collected examples of manipulated code or binaries: http://www.koch.ro/blog/index.php?/archives/153-On-distributing-binaries.html
I don’t think that it’s too hard to get a gpg key, go to a signing party on your next software conference and sign all your releases. It’s rather dumb easy. And you can use signed git tags on github or any other git hosting platform to provide a very strong confidence for your user that they can trace you back in case you provided bad code.
– Thomas Koch 2013-01-24 12:57 UTC
AlexSchroeder True, it is not “too hard” for many people. But when I write a little throw-away piece of code like EmacsWiki:1000 Words it’s a bit much to ask. I’ve never been to a key signing party. I never go to software conferences. I post it on the wiki. And when I write another little piece of code, I do it again. That’s why my code ends up on the wiki and not on github. I keep hoping people will volunteer to maintain code I wrote and either add it to Emacs itself or maintain it in decent repositories. I just don’t see myself doing it. I like the division of labor between programming and packaging.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-01-25 10:24 UTC
Thomas Koch It might be a bit too much to sign a little script of 10 lines that I can quickly review. I was rather referring to big software projects. However once you’ve got a gpg key you can sign a small code snippet just as easily as you can sign an email.
– Thomas Koch 2013-01-26 10:11 UTC
AlexSchroeder I think now the discussion turns to the question of where to draw the line. There’s exactly one large project that is exclusively hosted on Emacs Wiki, I think: EmacsWiki:Icicles. Others, such as EmacsWiki:Anything moved to github. Other, like EmacsWiki:Gnus or EmacsWiki:BBDB were never hosted on Emacs Wiki to begin with. Then there are the large collection of inofficial extensions like the ones listed on EmacsWiki:rcirc. Do they count as a single project or is each file a separate one? From my point of view, each one is a separate project. I just use two of them myself. As such, they are not really “a little script of 10 lines” but they don’t feel like big software projects, either.
I think I’m with Aaron. Emacs Wiki mostly hosts code on the wiki that one could view as “incubator” stuff. Things that haven’t made it into their own repositories or that haven’t made it into Emacs itself. Thus, asking for version control and signed releases is—in the context of code hosted on Emacs Wiki—asking for the right thing at the wrong time. It’s premature for those small single file projects that are hanging in Limbo somewhere between ten lines and inclusion into Emacs or indendence as their separate projects.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-01-26 11:46 UTC
dim Using El-Get you can easily add a checksum in your setup so that you only automatically get code from EmacsWiki with that checksum. So if you get to a new machine or re-install your Emacs setup from scratch, and the newly downloaded EmacsWiki code does not match your checksum, El-Get will refuse to load it for you. You can get the checksum interactively using M-x el-get-checksum command.
– dim 2013-01-27 21:13 UTC
AlexSchroeder Excellent feature!
– AlexSchroeder 2013-01-28 07:23 UTC
In 2012, I basically took pictures using Instagram, shared them with Facebook (part of the family), Twitter (another part of the family), Flickr (my favorite), and I used IFTTT to send a copy to Picasa Web because I felt that I’d like to have some pictures for people to see on Google+.
But then, when Instagram changed its terms of service (they rephrased them somewhat) and I decided that I might want to look into using something else for a bit.
I liked the new Flickr app somewhat.
I tried organizing my pictures on Picasa Web but was unable to create a new empty album in order to move some of my pictures in the Scrapbook album. When I selected more than 300 of the pictures and tried to move them, it also told me I could not move more than 100 at a time. I was confused. It looked like the user interface could use some improvements. I even started up my local Picasa copy and wasn’t clear on how to use it to manage my albums online. Perhaps you can’t. I was not impressed. It looks as if I’m not going to abandon iPhoto any time soon. Then again, I really want to abandon iPhoto one of these days because I hate it’s opaque storage regime.
Also, the lens or the protective plastic cover of my iPhone camera is scratched. The photos from the main camera now all look hazy. The terrible quality had resulted in me taking a lot of self-portraits from the second camera.
Since I didn’t want to use Instagram too often, I have uploaded the pictures to Flickr directly. This means that I haven’t posted any pictures to Facebook; I haven’t posted any pictures to Twitter, and none where uploaded to Picasa Web.
Strangely enough it doesn’t bother me.
Maybe it bothers me a bit because I’ve been using simple photos of my daily life as a replacement for status updates for my family and friends. We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll post status updates again. Or I’ll abandon Facebook. Or resume the use of Instagram.
I was writing a Perl CGI script that takes a SVG file I created with Inkscape, replaces a few placeholders and serves it via the web. How to supply this SVG file with an external TrueType font?
Upload the font – http://campaignwiki.org/Purisa.ttf
Add an appropriate MIME type – in the directory where the font file is, register an appropriate MIME type in your .htaccess file:
AddType application/x-font-ttf .ttf
If you are creating a new .htaccess file, remember it needs a permission like -rw-r--r--.
Add an external style sheet to the SVG file – it is not obvious how to do this in Inkscape. I guess you can open the XML Editor and add an svg:style element. I just pasted the following into the beginning of my SVG file:
<style
type="text/css">
@font-face {
font-family: 'Purisa';
src: local('Purisa'),
url('/Purisa.ttf') format('truetype');
}
</style>Care about Internet Explorer? I don’t have access to IE at the moment. I read that you might need to add an .eot file to support IE, and that would also require another MIME type to be added. You can convert a .ttf font to an .eot font using ttf2eot on the web.
If you want to get started with Google+, here is what I would suggest:
*asteriskes* to make them bold. You might say, for example: “I’m a gamer and love to talk about table-top role-playing games (RPG) such as classic D&D from the eighties and computer role-playing games for the Xbox (CRPG) like Skyrim.”When posting, try to keep the posts on topic and share them with the appropriate circles only. Check out this flow chart about sharing on Google+.
You’ll find that Google adds “What’s Hot” items to your stream. This sucks! Somewhere in the vicinity of these posts you’ll find a way to adjust how many of these posts you’ll find in your stream. Setting the slider to zero worked for me. 
Much later, you might want to install Chrome and check out the “Uncircle Uncircles” and “Uncircle Inactives” add-ons to prune your circles again.
If you have a web cam hooked up to your computer, look out for ConstantCon games via Google+ if that is your thing (it’s not for me).
Recently Calithena of Fight On asked on Dragonsfoot: Do any of you have your campaigns on line?
I said:
There’s more… There must be at least two short Burning Wheel campaigns on that site (Burning Six, Campaign:Krythos). And a Mongoose Traveller game that switched to Diaspora (Campaign:Kaylash). And a wiki I used for my DM notes when running the Kurobano campaign (Campaign:Attaxa). And a Forgotten Realms campaign using D&D 3.5 (Sohn des schwarzen Marlin). And another D&D 3.5 sandbox (Campaign:Grenzmarken).
I totally recommend keeping notes online! 
(I run the Campaign Wiki site which explains why I’m so enthusiastic about it.)
Back in 2009 I wondered about network traffic. Decided to take another look. Yesterday’s log file via bot-analyze:
aschroeder@thinkmo:~$ bot-analyze < logs/access.log.1 | head
----------------------------Bandwidth-------Hits-------Actions
Everybody 2177M 113317
All Bots 274M 16154 100% 9%
--------------------------------------------------------------
www.google.com 92390K 5542 34% 2%
yandex.com 63545K 3954 24% 9%
bot 33803K 2309 14% 1%
superfeedr.com 31740K 1091 6% 63%
www.bing.com 14161K 525 3% 4%
ahrefs.com 9251K 465 2% 2%I’m surprised – bots are responsible for 14% of all my hits. That’s better than what I saw in 2009.
The way I have set up my web pages, bots should not crawl “actions” (URLS containing the action parameter) – and yet 9% of them do it, and superfeedr does it most of all. I should investigate, I guess.
I was reading Stefan Poag’s post Do I know how to be a famous artist? He lists some questions he thinks artists should answer for themselves. The question “How to make sure that anyone who’s interested in your art is able to buy something, regardless of how little or how much they have to spend” reminded me of something…
What I would like to see is a simple, semi-automated process on artists’ websites. Artists would post cool pictures and they’d all include the following:
I feel that’d be better than a tipping jar but still not as convoluted as the usual process. There is no email exchange required. I don’t get to decide anything about the piece – but perhaps some people will approach the artist with adaptations they’d like to see, in which case you do your usual sales process.
I don’t know whether this would have led to a ton of sales, but I’m sure I would have spent maybe $10 or $20 on little stuff like that; things I can use on my blog, on my campaign wikis, submit to Fight On! (where upon I’d maybe pay the little extra required for a print product).
I think as a small artist it’s important to not waste money with a lawyer. Keep it short and simple. You won’t be going to court anyway – if people are not going to pay then that’s “shrinkage" on the web or whatever you want to call it. But give those people who want to buy something small an option.
Do you think it’d work?
As for my own lousy drawings, they’re available for free because I wouldn’t pay for them myself. 
AlexSchroeder At first, this is what I had installed:
@font-face { font-family: 'EB Garamond'; src: url('http://campaignwiki.org/EBGaramond12-Regular.otf'); /* For IE */ src: local('EB Garamond'), url('http://campaignwiki.org/EBGaramond12-Regular.ttf') format('truetype'); } body, rss { font-family: Garamond, GaramondNo8, "EB Garamond", serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 20pt; margin:1em 3em; padding:0; }My original reaction: Ugh, now that I’m back in the office and sitting at a Windows machine using Firefox, I notice a delay between page load and text display. In fact, monospaced text uses a different font and is displayed immediately. Ordinary text using Garamond gets shown with a delay of a few moments. I just checked and it seems that I have Garamond installed. Why the delay?
– AlexSchroeder 2013-04-15 06:46 UTC
AlexSchroeder Well, I looked at
mod_expireand added the following to my.htaccessfile:To no avail!
Looking back, I see what went wrong: the font is being loaded from a different domain. I was updating the wrong file.
Then I remembered that Google also hosts EB Garamond. They provide a link to a CSS fragment which contains the
@font-faceinstruction. I added the following to my CSS file:@font-face { font-family: 'EB Garamond'; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; src: local('EB Garamond'), local('EBGaramond'), url(https://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/ebgaramond/v4/kYZt1bJ8UsGAPRGnkXPeFdIh4imgI8P11RFo6YPCPC0.woff) format('woff'); } body, rss { font-family: Garamond, GaramondNo8, "EB Garamond", serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 20pt; margin:1em 3em; padding:0; }I looked at the page headers being sent back and forth using the Firefox Live Headers extension and saw that the font is requested (even though I think the browser will be using the local font instead) – but at least the server now replies with a
304 Not Modifiedstatus.Time passes…
Finally I understand what’s wrong! I need to list the alternative local names within the
@font-facedeclaration! With the following setup, I can see that no remote font is loaded.@font-face { font-family: 'Garamond'; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; src: local('Garamond'), local('GaramondNo8'), local('EB Garamond'), local('EBGaramond'), url(https://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/ebgaramond/v4/kYZt1bJ8UsGAPRGnkXPeFdIh4imgI8P11RFo6YPCPC0.woff) format('woff'); } body, rss { font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 20pt; margin:1em 3em; padding:0; }– AlexSchroeder 2013-04-15
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