I just whipped up a simple icon search for Kitten Icons (based on Phosphor Icons). It’s not complete yet – I have a few other things to do before I can get back to it today – but you can play with it here:

https://kitten.small-web.org/reference/#finding-icons

And see the code for it here:

https://codeberg.org/kitten/site/src/branch/main/reference/IconExplorer.fragment.js

I popped the event handler into the Markdown page itself. Not the cleanest but works in a pinch:

https://codeberg.org/kitten/site/raw/branch/main/reference/index.page.md

I wrote a new thing...

...and it's not what I meant to write...

...but it's what I needed to

https://fromemily.com/every-choice-a-million-deaths/

@actuallyautistic

#ActuallyAutistic #ActuallyADHD #AmWriting #Writing #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #blogging #SmallWeb
#IndieWeb #grief #FromEmily #neurodivergent

New Kitten Release

• Breaking change: `kitten.icons` namespace is now flat (not alphabetically sharded). This should make it much nicer to author with. (The alphabetical sharding was an attempt to work around a size limitation with large objects when using automatic type inference in the TypeScript language server. Since I’m now generating a TypeScript type definition for the entire data structure, the limitation no longer applies and thus the sharding is no longer necessary.) https://kitten.small-web.org/reference/#icons

• The `tags` and `categories` hash tables on `kitten.icons` – which are included as authoring-time aids to help you find icons using metadata searches in your editor – are now marked as unenumerable properties so they no longer pollute the root icons namespace so you can, for example, safely iterate through all icons with a simple loop.

• I’ve started a change log even though Kitten is still pre-release so there is a better place to find them than looking through my Mastodon release notification posts :) https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md

Enjoy!

Self Promo Sunday #8

It's Self Promo Sunday, Y'all! Share your Small Web site in the comments and/or let us know what you've been working on lately!

@indieweb @smallweb @neocities ##indieweb ##neocities ##nostalgia ##oldweb ##smallweb ##webdesign ##webdev ##webrevival #Nekoweb

https://smallweb.thecozy.cat/blog/%f0%9f%92%97-self-promo-sunday-8-%f0%9f%92%97/

A website by Norman Köhring @Koehr . Quoting the front page:

The 250KB Club is a collection of web pages that share certain values, especially a focus on performance, efficiency, accessibility and sustainability.

Websites in this list must not exceed 256KB compressed size!

Yes, compressed size. It makes much more sense because it allows for a lot of text to be transferred without having a big impact on the total size, while the impact of media is basically unaffected.

If your pages exceeds 250KB, you might consider 512kB.club or 1MB.club.

You can suggest a web page for this collection via Sourcehut or via Github. The site will be reviewed and, if applicable, added to the list below. Pages are checked in irregular intervals, but not more than once every week.

All entries have their own sub page with additional information. If you want, you can directly link to it from your page.

I take a quick look at the “Explore” tab of the Marginalia search engine. Marginalia is a small, traditional search engine that indexes traditional websites, by which I mean mostly sites that are statically generated and not “single-page applications” (SPAs), things like blogs, wikis, non-corporate news, instruction manuals, free-to-read works of fiction, web comics, and so on. The “Explore” tab shows you some random selection of indexed web pages.

So much of my "personal site" update anxiety has been freed now that I can just type on my wiki from phone at 3am on the porcelein throne. HOORAY (now to figure out a mobile workflow for fujofans lmao)

Anyways, here is my first Now page update in a year.

https://wiki.scumsuck.com/now

I don’t know how to structure & organize my #website. So I wrote on my website that I don’t know how to structure & organize it.

I don’t have much on my website yet. So I made a list on my website of what I have planned.

I'm really starting to revel in this "just say the thing out loud" approach...

...rather than wait for a polished product, I'm sharing the messy process

...and I'm kind of loving it.

https://fromemily.com/all-the-things/

new #kiki update a'for the weekend because i know it's such a great idea to release patches on a friday afternoon

this adds a really nice feature: now you can add any custom dynamic variables you want to /layout/dynamic.bug, and pages can use them!

this idea is courtesy of @minterpunct who is the first kiki webmaster use dynamic content *really* creatively in their pages - storing chunks of html code that can be re-used all over the place - stuff like emojis and javascript code! i honestly never imagined using it this way, and it's a super smart way of re-using code without having to retype it anywhere

https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki/devlog/936985/v1010-patch-notes

New Kitten Release

https://kitten.small-web.org

(Run `kitten update` to update your dev machines. Production machines will automatically update in a couple of hours.)

• You can now add a generic script block to your markdown pages (see https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114432417394114105)

• Markdown pages can now be `KittenPage` instances and attach `KittenComponent` instances (so you get a full server-side component hierarchy with an event-based workflow; ideal for authenticated pages where you can be use only the author of the page will be accessing them and thus the additional memory and processing overhead are not issues. Isn’t the Small Web great? Only having instances of one makes it possible to optimise so many things for the human experience instead of vertical scale of the data farming machine.)

• Two new examples showcase the new features: https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/examples/streaming-html/markdown-script-simple-components and https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/examples/streaming-html/markdown-kitten-components

• Attributes with object values are no longer serialised into the DOM (but your components’ render functions will continue to receive them, of course.) This is because only string values make sense for attributes in the context of the HTML DOM. (You can still, of course, have stringified representations of objects in attributes, as used by the `data` attribute to pass data from nodes to event handers on the server.)

Coming soon: Generic script blocks in markdown pages in Kitten¹

The line between what you can do from a Markdown page vs what you can do from a JavaScript page in Kitten continues to blur… soon, you’ll be able to add a generic script block to the front matter of your Markdown pages for quick little things.

e.g., In the screenshots you see all the code necessary to create the page with the reactions component which actually persists the results to your data. That is all the code in your app. Nothing else. No scaffolding or anything else. Seriously :)

¹ https://kitten.small-web.org

Some people have asked about my @omgdotlol account. They want to know what it is. Or simply why it is?

I’m not really sure how to respond It’s just fun and interesting. It feels like the small web. The “web 1.0” (which wasn’t even called that at the time) but with modern tools.

And @adam is good people. He cares about his products and the people using them.

Check it out. Maybe join us.
https://home.omg.lol/referred-by/markwyner

back in the early 90s my parents brought home an ibm ps/1 with an internal 2400 baud modem. i assumed it was only for sending/receiving faxes.

one day my computer teacher (thank you mr. mckinney!) explained that the modem made my computer capable of dialing out to *other computers* and exchanging data with them. he printed off a five page ream of tractor feed paper titled "The 403 BBS List" and sent me home with it.

i stayed up until 3am that night, dialing every single board on that list using Windows Terminal, creating accounts, and exploring what BBSes were capable of. by the wee hours, i had a new terminal program (Terminate!), knew how to use the z-modem protocol, and had
pirated my first game

one of the little mysteries i came across that night was FILE_ID.DIZ files. every board had them. every zip file had them. they were tiny capsule descriptions of what a program/game was, constrained to 45 cols and 10 rows of ascii. they usually also included some kind of nod to the piracy group that "released" the program.

most BBS software would extract the .DIZ file from the zip, and use that as a file area description for the program, allowing users to understand what they were downloading.

to celebrate this weird little historical curio, today kiki got a FILE_ID.DIZ packed into the zip

in version 1.10 onwards every copy of kiki will now include a FILE_ID.DIZ.

if you haven't heard of kiki yet, check out the project page:
https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

and if you're new to the kiki community, please post to the #kiki hashtag so we can start building a little webring of kiki instances

Morning all! I was supposed to join @screwlisp for their Lispy Gopher Show podcast yesterday but time zone differences meant I had to send a recording instead which they discussed with questions from their mud (yep, it’s a geeky community) :)

I touched on the history of computing, the current challenge to our human rights and democracy with technofascism, and how the Small Web is one attempt to safeguard our freedoms by creating a peer-to-peer web owned and controlled by everyday people who use technology as an everyday thing. (And the role of design and simplicity in making that possible.)

Anyway, here’s the full recording I sent (as it skips around a bit in the show):

https://vimeo.com/1079992713

And here’s the recording of the show itself with commentary by screwlisp and the community:

https://communitymedia.video/w/kTjUgHSYCZsJwucUPVoLgx

Thanks for having me on and sorry I couldn’t be there in person.

Since the #lispyGopherClimate #technology #podcast's main mastodon instance continues to be inaccessible and we got relatively less listeners, here's the archive and a summary again):

https://communitymedia.video/w/kTjUgHSYCZsJwucUPVoLgx

@aral is presenting about his nonprofit's #decentralised #smallweb. Due to a TZ hiccup, Aral's a great recording we discuss throughout.

https://codeberg.org/kitten/app

#Kitten is the developer-centric mature component to go with the Domain and Places WIP components.

https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

#lispyGopherClimate #archive! show mastodon is down/please #boost if you see this so people see this/
https://communitymedia.video/w/kTjUgHSYCZsJwucUPVoLgx
#climateCrisis #haiku from @kentpitman as always!

#smallnet #smallweb episode feat. @aral of https://small-web.org/ and #Kitten.
due to a timezone mixup, Aral is a recording. I have no idea what he has recorded.

First in a string of guest interviews.

We were planning to talk about the attacks on @Codeberg and #hyperlinks I think

#openbsd release #Eev #emacs #lisp

Ooh, what’s this?… Look Over There!
(With apologies to Jaida Essence Hall)

So the little app I teased earlier is ready and deployed and I have our own instance running at:

https://look-over-there.small-web.org

Look Over There! lets you forward multiple domains to different URLs with full HTTPS support.

Why?

We have a number of older sites that are becoming a chore/expensive to maintain and yet I don’t want to break the web. So I thought, hey, I’ll just use the “url forwarding” feature of my domain registrar to forward them to their archived versions on archive.org.

Ah, not so fast, young cricket… seems some domain registrars’ implementations of this feature do not work if the domain being forwarded is accessed via HTTPS (yes, in 2025).

So, given Kitten¹ uses Auto Encrypt² to automatically provision Let’s Encrypt certificates, I added a domain forwarding feature to it and created Look Over There! as a friendly/simple app that provides a visual interface to it.

To see it in action, hit https://cleanuptheweb.org and you should get forwarded to the archived version of it on archive.org. I’m going to be adding more of our sites to the list in the coming days as part of an effort to reduce my maintenance load and cut down our expenses at Small Technology Foundation.

Since it’s Small Web, this particular instance is just for us. However, you can run your own copy on a VPS (or even a little single-board computer at home, etc.) A link to the source code repository is on the site. Once Domain³ is ready for use (later this year ), setting up your own instance of a Small Web app at your own server will take less than a minute.

I hope this little tool, along with the 404→307 (evergreen web) technique⁴, helps us to nurture an evergreen web and avoid link rot. (And the source code, as little as there is because Kitten does so much for you, is a good resource if you want to learn about Kitten’s new class-based component and page model which I haven’t yet had a chance to properly document.)

Enjoy!

¹ https://kitten.small-web.org
² https://codeberg.org/small-tech/auto-encrypt
³ https://codeberg.org/domain/app
⁴ https://4042307.org

New Kitten Release

• New: Any attributes present in a <markdown> tag are now passed to the first rendered element. (This is useful if you want to add some quick inline styles to a <p> that’s rendered from markdown, etc., but for anything more complicated, you should likely just jump into HTML.)

To learn more about Markdown in Kitten, please see the Markdown reference¹.

Enjoy!

¹ https://kitten.small-web.org/reference/#markdown-support