What it means to be distributed. Mastodon can't go down, neither can RSS. But Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook can.#
I've been working on the search function for this blog, and now we have all the DaveNet pieces between 1994 and 2004 in the database. So here's a search for menu sharing which was a technology we made on the Mac that allowed people to write menus of scripts in Frontier that appear inside other apps. Netscape supported it as did MSIE, Quark, Eudora and many others. It was kind of magical, esp when the apps themselves were scriptable (many of them were in the 90s). Next up, I'm going to import the home page of Scripting News from 1997 to 2010. It was mostly a linkblog then. #
Having the 90s and 00s in the index means I can look up old friends like Chuck Shotton.#
As the import script runs I just tried looking up Engadget, got zero hits. I expect that link will work in a while after all the importing is done. #
And with this update, we don't depend on OPML any longer to create the database, all the data is exported in a format that can be easily imported directly into an SQL database. I provide the schema and example JavaScript code that, via SQL, updates a database. Hopefully this creates a better more useful archive. #
Apparently Chrome has changed the behavior of images served over http in web pages. It's changing the request to https, so it gives an erroneous error message about the certificate which the page never claimed to have. #
I was going to use this code in the UI of my search engine, when it wanted to display an image over http, reroute it to use an https proxy server. But Chrome wouldn't stay out of the way, so had to give up. Hey I was trying to route around their outage.#
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)