web

There are 19 posts tagged web (this is page 2 of 2).

NGINX

Continuing my server odyssey, I managed to set up NGINX, eventually, after looking at several options for alternatives to Apache. Although I was drawn to Hiawatha (mentioned in yesterday’s post), there were no current binaries available for Debian (the directory and repository came up blank). It would have been possible to compile it from source, but the instructions were long and complicated and its own documentation “strongly advises” using a binary.

So I moved the DNS back to my own server after the site’s latest short sojourn at Fastmail. Direct access to the photo albums still don’t work because I haven’t figured out how to make that apache .htaccess transformation from a standard directory to a fancy formatted gallery served through php so far. It requires moving the contents of the .htaccess file into the NGINX site configuration file since NGINX handles rewrites differently. While there’s an apache .htaccess to NGINX configuration file tool available online, the result doesn’t work for me, so I’ve reached out to the Novagallery developer. If Novagallery doesn’t work for me, I’ll find another simple system. There are even instructions available on a DIY solution [1] for doing almost exactly what Novagallery does, but although that is a solution to part of the puzzle, I think that Novagallery goes a little further.

Links

[1] Is there a way to create a simple static image gallery in nginx without any third-party utilities? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39575873/is-there-a-way-to-create-a-simple-static-image-gallery-in-nginx-without-any-thir

Olives, loquats | dealing with complexity | web fonts

The olives are in bloom, meaning many people will have allergies. It looks like there are many flowers this year: does that mean there will be many fruits? (Olives are famously biennial bearing).

Olive flowers

“Inconvenient complexity”

Manuel linked to the Spanish translation of an article of a Prof. Boaventure de Sousa Santos, a professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. The article is called “the inconvenient complexity” and concerns the situation in Ukraine. In English I was able only to find a different article by him, Europe Is Sleepwalking Into Another World War, which is published in a Bulgarian newspaper.

Unfortunately this is one of those times when people tend to see reality in mutually opposing ways. As with those optical illusions, you can see something as either one way, or you can see it another way, but never both ways at the same time. So everyone is speaking with absolute conviction, and they are being utterly honest. They become extremely angry whenever someone like this professor or Noam Chomsky come along and point out nuance or complexity.

Optical illusions are always manipulative. Someone has worked very hard to create the conditions in which we will see reality in a certain way. That old riddle about newspapers, “What’s black and white and read all over?” still rings true. In times of war, everyone is seeing reality in black and white terms, and the outcome really is red all over.

The question is what to do about nuance. Also known as fud. It’s popular among Israelis to introduce complexity whenever there is discussion about what should be done about the occupied territories or the possibility of restorative justice. Beneath complexity, we look for hard truths. The image of justice is always the scale. Taking all of the complicating factors into consideration, we “weigh” our options.

There will always be people like Christopher Isherwood, who, like his friend W.H. Auden, fled to America with the onset of war. Its usually those who enjoy privilege who are able to evade conscription, though they are not necessarily wrong to do so.

When I was faced with the prospect of being conscripted into the Israeli army, I became so convinced that this is not something that I should do that I worked with uncharacteristic determination to ensure that it would never happen. But I would never argue that everyone should make the same choice. I do not know whether there is a soul, but I do believe in the existence of conscience.

Being aware of the attempts to manipulate our opinion, perceptive of complexity, and bearing in mind concepts like responsibility, of our individual and group roles, and many other things, is never going to be easy. But, at least in societies where the individual is king, that is what we must do. We load everything on the scale, and see which way it tips.

If we are lucky, we may not have to decide whether we personally need to fight. On the other hand, we can’t ignore a conflict taking place on our doorstep. Should we make sacrifices in order to boycott the aggressor?; do we agree that our nation will send weapons? What if it comes to an all-around war such as de Sousa Santos envisages?

Links

Best Font for Online Reading: No Single Answer https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-reading/

This article is full of interesting information, but is of little practical value to designers. Some people read some fonts more quickly, whereas others read other fonts more quickly, and most are not actually aware of which fonts work best for them.

One of the most often used fonts, Open Sans, seems to have the worst readability. I’m surprised that Garamond tops the list for readable fonts.

Hubzilla | state of the web

Growing this site

I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but, in my free time I have been tidying up my Hubzilla site and making various improvements. One intended improvement resulted in the accidental deletion of one of my wikis, but it was not such a significant loss. After going back and forth on the question of how to collect web links – such as for comment in blogging. Hubzilla’s bookmarks module looks like it still needs some work, though it is very easy to share bookmarks to it, via a browser bookmarklet. See my channel timeline for a discussion on the pros and cons of the system. In the meantime, I will be using another Hubzilla module.

Along the way, I discovered that sharing from the photos module can result in disaster (by sharing a bunch of uploaded photos from the photos module, each photo becomes a separate status post – eek!)

Chris Trottier has a short article [1] on the imperfections of the Fediverse as a decentralized social network, and why it is still the most viable solution that is currently available. He says that although better protocols exist for decentralized social networking, the Fediverse is currently the only one (other than email – which has become increasingly centralized) that has sufficient engagement and momentum. As for me, while it would be possible for a system like Hubzilla to incorporate social networking via XMPP (the protocol is already supported by Hubzilla), I think it would not be possible to do all that I do in Hubzilla with a protocol entirely based on XMPP.

I too have various gripes with the Fediverse. I was unable to subscribe to Trottier’s Pixelfed account through Hubzilla. And I discovered today that while I am unable to subscribe to any Diaspora account, they can subscribe to me. I have yet to see whether Diaspora posts will show up in my stream. The web

There were a couple of other interesting articles on the web lately. We discovered that DuckDuckGo is filtering out search results that reference the Pirate Bay and YouTubeDL [2].

DDG also announced lately that they will filter Russian “disinformation” from their results. SearX is the engine I try to use, but the Disroot instance that I use seems to depend mainly on results from the other big search engines, which do the same filtering.

There are more search engines mentioned, but many of these are “not supported”. On the Disroot instance, or completely?

Anil Dash has a positive piece, “A web renaissance” [3]

“Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again.

“… now, the entire ecosystem has seen that there’s no safety in being subject to the whims of the tech giants. Some don’t like having to pay to promote their content online. Some don’t like being deranked by capricious algorithms. Some don’t like being on a treadmill of constantly trying to optimize for search engines. Some don’t like being on platforms that promoted hate or abuse. Everyone has something that frustrates them.

“On your own site, though, under your own control, you can do things differently. Build the community you want. I’m not a pollyanna about this; people are still going to spend lots of times on the giant tech platforms, and not everybody who embraces the open web is instantly going to become some huge hit. Get your own site going, though, and you’ll have a sustainable way of being in control of your own destiny online.”

Books

I have decided to give George R.R. Martin a rest, or put him permanently to rest, for similar reasons that I eventually gave up on Gene Wolfe. Their world-building and force of imagination deserves praise, but, they demand too much of our time. Though their gift does not fail them, artificial worlds eventually come up against certain limits, like the hero of “The Truman Show”.

I feel a need to spend time with something else. Candidates are the writings of Christopher Isherwood and more Patrick Modiano.

Links

  1. Why I’m all in with the Fediverse even though I have gripes

https://blog.peerverse.space/why-im-all-in-with-the-fediverse-even-though-i-have-gripes/

  1. DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-and-youtube-dl-from-its-search-results-220415/

  1. A Web Renaissance

https://anildash.com/2022/04/13/a-web-renaissance/

Unlike Dash, who advocates benefiting from new web technologies, here is a piece that speaks out for keeping things as simple as possible, and make sites that are designed to outlast the latest technological whims.

This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

Indeed there was a time not so long ago that every site seemed to depend upon Flash. What a horror that was.

Photos | Big Tech | Registration Walls | Telegram

Channel 11 ran an article on the Big Tech companies that focused on several aspects: that they don’t pay taxes in this country; that they are virtually unreachable if they happen to close your account; that they invade privacy; that they are anticompetitive; that they manipulate the government and the legal system to insure their monopolies are not threatened, etc. It managed to get through all this material pretty well.

I’m beginning to think website “registration walls” are almost as bad as paywalls. They are just as effective at locking me out anyhow, because I usually refuse to register. I just tried to read an article on The Intercept and hit one of these. I’m more and more convinced that piracy is the way for those of us who value our privacy and are too poor to subscribe to umpteen journals. It feels scrappy, and it deprives journals of their incomes, but if they can’t honour our privacy and set up a sensible system for donations or occasional payments, I think it isn’t our problem.

The EFF has posted information (in English) intended to help Ukrainians and Russians use Telegram more safely: Telegram Harm Reduction for Users in Russia and Ukraine . It is kind of a shame that Telegram itself doesn’t do more to make this information available to its users. Telegram is not private by default and does not do enough to make its privacy features easily available. Durov, on his own Telegram channel, just wrote a long post describing his tribulations with the Russian government and his family connections with Ukraine:

Some people wondered if Telegram is somehow less secure for Ukrainians, because I once lived in Russia. Let me tell these people how my career in Russia ended.

It could have been an opportunity to address users in Ukraine and Russia in a similar way that the EFF has just done.

US accused of hypocrisy for supporting sanctions against Russia but not Israel https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/us-sanctions-against-russia-but-not-israel The war invites many such comparisons and exposes double-standards like this.

Hubzilla again; this time from a home server

That’s it; after a huge effort, I’ve got Hubzilla working from home.  Not everything works properly yet, and I will have to try to iron out the bugs.  I spent the largest amount of time trying to set up msmtp; because otherwise it was impossible to send an email verification and create a channel. But nothing budged.  Eventually I saw that in the configuration files it is possible to disable email verification.

As a result of the account registration mix up, I ended up creating a first account that was not my admin account.  

UPDATE:  I now see from the help files that this can be updated manually by going into the database; it’s the only way to correct that problem. Not having an admin user is probably the cause of several other problems that I may be able to fix once I am the administrator.

UPDATE:  Sorted

the web itself

We had a discussion with Christopher Titmuss the other day, in which he talked about community. Someone raised the issue of “virtual community”, implying that his focus on real community might be a little backward-looking in the light of the advent of virtual communities. They gave the example of people in need being helped by crowd-funding. Titmus in his response focused on the surveillance capitalism aspects of Facebook and popular platforms. He said this was a poor substitute for real community, and that we should not delude ourselves into believing that there is any real community to be found in platforms intended only for the gain of their owners. He said that if he uses these platforms it is only to send announcements.

I found myself asking whether this applied to alternative internet social networks that lack profit motivation. I think he probably is not aware of such possibilities but that it is just as likely that he would still think them a poor substitute for real community.

I personally haven’t found in the alternative social networks a solution but would not discount the possibility that they might provide a fair solution to develop a planet wide community. But actually I’m beginning to think that the internet itself, or the web that lives on it, is our best and widest social network, rather than limit oneself to little islands. We should develop tools that harness the power of the whole web, rather than encampments. The Indie Web movement probably has the best ideas about how to do that. Because the problem is, on the vastness of the web, how do we find each other? Right now only spambots seem to manage to find my web page. And probably there are also bots and spiders operated by government security services that search for keywords. And other bad actors.

The internet is the closest we have come to networking human consciousness. It contains our worst and finest human traits, ideas, potential, everything. There is a wonderful opportunity there to contribute to raising our collective consciousness, just as there are opportunities to degrading it.

Privacy Badger

Some websites, like The Hindu (newspaper) don’t allow access from browsers with Ad blockers, but do allow access from browsers with the EFF’s Privacy Badger, which blocks ads that track you. That’s another reason to use this add-on, in browsers that it supports, in preference to Adblock Plus for example. PrivacyBadger doesn’t support Falkon browser for example, though it does support Waterfox.

New website for Haaretz newspaper giving me trouble

Letter to Haaretz.com: “Your new web site causes Google Chrome to lock up when accessing articles. I’m running Chrome on Linux with plugin Flashblock (since I don’t like flash commercial content). I have managed to overcome the lock up by disabling cookies and javascript on your site.”

I’m wondering, though, if this is a conscious attempt by the news site to make it uncomfortable for viewers who block their ad content.