lab notes: the web

RSS

2025-11-18 by bruce42

I added a "ticker' module when I put together the site to act as a news aggregator - something I had in place on previous iterations of the site, and something I find very useful.

Putting the ticker feed together made me realize how easy I had it 15 years ago. Most of the sites on the ticker feed don't actually have links to their feeds or old-fashioned RSS buttons. I had to find them by appending /rss or /feed or /rss-feed or /rss.xml, etc to find the hidden feeds. And some sites that did have "advertised" RSS feeds gave badly structured or bloated feeds measuring megabytes in size.

Anyway, since I find RSS feeds so useful I figured I'd add my own in case anyone wants it. also added a human readable feed of recent blog and project log updates. Both are under the changelogs on the home page.

The "Useless" Web

2025-02-22 by bruce42

As long as the web has been able to display more that plain text, there have been pages that are "useless". Sites that aren't for the dissemination of information or provisioning of a service. Some are "art" sites; not websites that are used to display or document art or artists, but the website itself is made to be an interactive art piece. Then there are timewasters - sites that show interactive visualizations, puzzles, mini games, etc... These rose to prominence in the "Flash" era, but thanks to modern CSS and JavaScript live on.

Here's a collection of "useless" websites I've recently found and have enjoyed for years. Browse at your own risk, there are sites with flashing light and sound warnings:

superbad - an early art site
the useless web - randomized links to a wide variety of "useless" sites
paint toys - the name says it all.
staggering beauty - art? timewaster? sure.

The Vanishing Web

2025-01-10 by bruce42

I recently read How to disappear completely by s.e. smith at theverge.com and it sent me down a little rabbit hole. The article poses the question "What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?" It's something I've thought about quite a bit recently as I've been working to restore old my content to this site.

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a site recovery 15 years in the making

2024-10-22 by Brian

On the restoration and updating of a Drupal 4.7 based website recovered from archived backups.

I didn't keep great notes as I worked through this project and I did pretty minimal research - I was inspired to give it a go one day and I just went for it. So I'm doing my best to put a coherent work log together from memory.

Page is under construction, all content subject to change.

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Why we are still using 88x31 buttons

2024-04-16 by Brian

introduction

If you surf the modern "small web" to any extent you've encountered 88x31 buttons - a staple of late 90s and early 2000's websites1 undergoing a bit of a revival. The Neocities community especially seems to have truly embraced them. 88x31 buttons have a long history on the web, straddling the worlds of advertising and the personal web. Much like IRL jacket pins and buttons - they're small, colorful, collectible, easy to make and trade, and at a glance can confer just enough information to characterize the website displaying them.

Some examples of sites sharing some thematic elements spanning over 25 years:
Dann's Page
Bill's World
Paintkiller's links page
Solaria's Webspace
Ellie's Magical Website
ByteMoth's Perfectly Cooked Pages

They all feature 88x31 buttons in some capacity and those buttons reflect the website and it's designer in some way.

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Searching for search

2024-03-01 by Brian

Search engines don't search.

At least not how we might want them to or how we may have grown up expecting them to. Just type "anyone else notice search results are useless?" into your favorite mainstream search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc...) and you'll get a bunch of hits ranging from Reddit posts to serious articles outlining the failings of modern search engines.

The issues are generally the same - SEO spam, intrusive ads, companies filtering or redirecting results to their own services and affiliates. And it's all being accelerated by AI - AI generated images, AI generated site content, AI filtered and interpreted results.

And it isn't your imagination, consider this TechSpot article by Alfonso Maruccia titled "New study confirms the obvious, search results are only getting worse". It outlines the results of a German study that spent a year tracking product review search results from three popular search tools - Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Suffice to say, the results are not encouraging:

Popular search engines are losing the cat-and-mouse game against SEO-oriented spam, the German researchers say, while the line between "benign" content and worthless link farms has become increasingly blurry. The situation will only worsen with generative AI algorithms, which can be (ab)used to instantly eject a lot of low-quality, fact-free content that would be perfect for SEO spam and SERP manipulation.

The research team focused on product review searches, and per the article Google responded to the study saying that it doesn't reflect the overall "quality and helpfulness" of search results.

I disagree.

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