Apart from the infinitely extended left-hand column.
How were people back them supposed to know the planet had more than ten years left to exist?
I wonder if the web experience has, on average, gotten worse in the last 10 years.
When the world was young, and men and seals were fiercer.
one of very few sites that have had no styling changes in over ten years, but don't look dated.
Agreed. It really is a bit remarkable.
We had a thread on this a while back but LGM has really become unreadable. What a shitty design. And Disqus is the worst. But they get heavy traffic if number of comments and new commenters are any indication so I suspect it will continue to get worse.
2: Honestly, the Mayans really let us down there.
A style update? Hah. The site hasn't even had a goddamn blogroll update.
There is some corner of Unfogged
That is forever Poor Man
The pervasiveness of autoplay video alone makes this the darkest web timeline.
Last major change: comment timestamps?
I wish Nosflow would implement the one-line CSS fix for iOS devices I sent him, though.
LGM is now much better on a phone than a laptop. Not sure how it is on a tablet. Maybe their usage numbers showed them that was the way to go.
WordPress arbitrarily changed the undergirdings at Frumious Consortium, and now all sorts of niggling things annoy me about how we look. I should be figuring that out, or even writing new reviews.
3: unquestionably. and you know why unfogged hasn't? no ads.
Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the blog.
Am I imagining it, or have websites with ads gotten way way worse in maybe just the last year? My standard experience on any website where I'm trying to read something is that a paragraph loads, and then everything freezes while bits load for literally close to a minute, and not infrequently the page never loads right. I'd blame my phone/laptop, but things got like this at home, work, and on my phone simultaneously it seemed.
No you aren't imagining it. And Firefox's stupid big chromealike rebuild just broke all the extensions I used to keep that shit under control.
A successful web design indeed! Now you just have to figure out how to monetize it.
I had the same problem. I had to install adblock just to read a hiking site that I look at.
Not "there are too many ads for me to read this enjoyably" but "this one particular fucking Arby's ad would also jump the page back to itself so that you could read the bottom of the page".
It's the second worst thing Arby's ever did to me.
I resisted adblock for so long because the websites that are absolutely impossible to use without adblock are unfortunately the very same websites I really want to continue to exist and be supported by ads. But after years of instantly closing out any link that turned out to be to a newspaper or TV channel website because I knew it would freeze my browser, I realized that wasn't helping them either.
As with everything, simplicity is always the key. I stripped down my own site to the bare minimum a while back (better to display photos) and it's been great ever since. Plus, it takes very little time to load now compared to all of the bells and whistles of the older designs.
As far as LGM, my trick is to continue to use an RSS reader and just read most articles that way - only navigating to the actual site if I want to comment (and even then the RSS feed lets me go directly to the post page so I can bypass the front page altogether. I don't think I saw the front page layout change for a full month after it happened).
I use uBlock Origin, and LGM works okay for me.
I am gearing up to switch from my LiveJournal account to a regular wordpress site. I've been at LiveJournal since 2005, but this past year they've done the following:
1. First they stopped using my chosen style on mobile devices, for anyone viewing my account without logging in. This is the style I've used since 2005, so it's hardly web-intensive. (Although it looks more dated than Unfogged does.)
2. They started showing ads anytime someone was viewing my journal through the generic style, in those situations.
3. Finally, this past month, they've started showing ads on my regular journal, in my chosen style, for anyone who is not logged in.
What makes this egregious is that I have a paid account. I'm both furious and completely intimidated by the idea that I'm going to have to figure out how to migrate the archives to my future site.
27: Everyone I know on LiveJournal migrated to DreamWidth.
Isn't Dreamwidth basically LiveJournal but not owned by creepy Russians?
Wow, I just found this headline: People are deleting their LiveJournal accounts because of new censorship rules from March 2017 - that apparently they rolled out some anti-LGBT censorship? Most of LiveJournal is Russian.
I'm learning now:
LiveJournal was bought by the Russian company SUP Media in 2007, but the servers themselves weren't relocated to Russia until December of 2016.
which explains why all this is coming to pass now.
I use Adblock Plus and over the last few (6?) months it has gotten less and less effective. First, it doesn't block those horrific autoplay videos that stalk you as you scroll down. Second, every site has learned to detect Adblock and many of them pop up demands (or sometimes, pleas) to whitelist them. If someone knows addons that fix those problems (in Chrome, at least) I'd love to hear about them. Idiotic arms races to join, though.
The few sites I read that require whitelisting and that I still want to read in spite of that have become almost unreadable.
I knew of Dreamwidth but hadn't really understood the reasons behind people migrating there.
Just as an aside, when I was a lad, you could lose your ARPANET accounts for sending advertising via email. (This was of course well before the Web existed.)
I use Ghostery in Firefox, but open links in Chrome with no ad blockers installed to look at sites that object to ad blockers. I think Ghostery itself may gather your data, but I'm using it to speed up sites not to evade all trackers. I've experimented with enabling trackers one by one (via Ghostery) on sites demanding whitelisting, and I've sometimes been able to allow only the minimum trackers required to stop the "whitelist us!" message from appearing.
I also use uBlock Origin on Chrome and the new Firefox. Works well.
In the 90s, I asked a partner/communications lawyer whether he thought this world wide web thingio* had a future. 'It'll soon be too choked with ads to be of any use to anyone' is how I remember his answer. Twenty years is 'soon' in geologic time . . .
* I don't remember what we were calling it then.
I once interviewed a woman who worked at Altavista in the late 90s and talked regretfully of how it had killed itself by choking the pages with al the ads they could find. This was before popup blockers killed the most obnoxious ones.
Then she went to work at Go\ogle: "Our mission at Go\ogle," she said was don't be evil to get people to accept advertising on the web" -- and went on to talk at length about how they had succeeded, by never making it too obnoxious.
Now she works at Buzzfeed. QED, or Karma, or something,
The Brave browser blocks ads and tracking without plugins and is just generally getting pretty awesome:
Main "problem" is that it can't handle streaming video served with DRM.
I don't have much of an ad problem, since I don't read that much, unless you folks link something, or I see it linked on twitter, and, in either case, it seems compelling. My principal peeve, though, is embedded videos in tweets. The value of the platform is the ability to scroll quickly through. Having the scroll disabled while some fucking cat video, or a clip of Kellyann Cnway, loads is decreasing the value, without putting any money in twitter's pockets. A crime against me, and against capitalism.
40: Good tip. I'm going to try it out when I get enough work done to merit taking a break right now.
Is geocities still around?
Alas, it was bought and destroyed by Yahoo.
It's probably appropriate that nobody will admit to knowing about geocities.
I remember reading something about Google way back in the day about how they didn't just declutter the search page but they optimized it for quick loading. Now it takes a while just for the Google home page to load before I even search for anything.
45: Search is built into most browsers' URL bars. Why visit the site?
I'm just trying Brave, but it's giving me trouble with my gmail. Doesn't like the cookies.
I use Bing in my URL bar so that I don't have my google history filled up with crap because I don't bookmark anything.
Has anyone else had trouble with microsoft Edge? I recently got the new Surface Pro and Edge is now the standard windows browser. It started out fine and then went from normal to sluggish to practically unusable over the course of about a week It doesn't seem to be a virus or malware issue because a) scans show the computer is clean and b) google Chrome and Firefox both work just fine.
I've taken the usual steps of flushing the cache regularly & etc. Is Edge just messed up generally? I wouldn't care except that you supposedly get much better battery life browsing with Edge vs Chrome.
I never even knew there was a browser named "Edge."
Today is a weird day, news-wise. Even leaving aside the shitstorm that is Trump/Republicans in Congress, you've got Matt Lauer, Garrison Kiellor, and the Dutch driving Santa Claus to drink poison in open court.
And those fucking vile retweets.
I remember reading something about Google way back in the day about how they didn't just declutter the search page but they optimized it for quick loading
I was an early google search user (probably '96), and while it's become a behemoth and shaped much of the current web environment (often in ways that are mixed) part of me still thinks of it as the weird, geeky, alternative search engine.
I'm kind of expecting Trump to combine pro-Russian sentiment, self-serving fabulism, and fascism into denial of the Bosnian genocide.
Google, that obscure second engine Yahoo relied upon to give you good results.
It's all been downhill since Gopher.
I'm so glad to see Matt Lauer get his. That fucking interview with Anne Hathaway has never left me. It wasn't even just the gross prurience about the photo. He kept pushing for her to tell how she made herself so anorexic for Les Mis even after she said she didn't want to glamorize it or help anyone else to do the same thing. (Whether she'd already glamorized it we'll leave for another time.)
14. If the fix makes text wrap on iOS, then I second the wish.
iOS didn't exist when this place was designed, so you should not use it. It's buttons and you're Amish.
The Amish don't use buttons on their phones, they went straight to the X with facial unlock and swipe to change apps.
Also Craigslist. It was almost exactly the same 20 years ago! Either that or I just haven't noticed the changes. I find it very comforting and nostalgic whenever I use it.
66 to the OP, if that was not clear
It's still the best way to meet a serial killer.
45 is true, for Google products in general (though, being sophisticated, I always search from the URL bar). When the product is Maps I can understand, but it's everything else as well.
What kills me is that fucking Facebook has the fucking slowest-ass, garbage take-forever-load-anything website, but the engine they use - React - has somehow become the most popular framework on the web right now, despite its shitty, shitty, performance. I don't get it.
Oh, and another brilliant Facebook move with their smartphone app - they've turned sound on for videos by default. Because when I'm screwing around on the phone in a semi-professional setting, yes, I love it when some viral video starts making noise and brings attention to my not focusing on whatever it is I should be doing.
Also, the literal biggest piece of shit on the entire east coast is now president of the United States.
Is there a bigger piece of shit west of here?
If you don't have a functioning State Department or won't use it, you tweet insults at @theresamay instead of @theresa_may and this matters because only one of those is used by the prime minister of the U.K.
73: It's a globe, so the answer is always yes.
despite its shitty, shitty, performance
React isn't notably slow. I think they use it for parts of Facebook and all of Instagram. And I'm pretty sure that any lag you experience on Facebook is due to querying a trillion-record database, not rendering the page.
React isn't slow because it fails to meet rendering benchmarks, React is slow because of the way it encourages websites to be developed: constantly going back and forth to the back-end for every little scrap of information, rather than just getting one big page worth of data and showing that.
How can I make Pokemon Go faster?
Buy an expensive phone.
My phone is only 3 years old. It's probably fine.
One of Mr. Robot's cousins of some sort has been missing for a couple of weeks following an online date. I want to say it was a Craigslist date, but might be remembering wrong. Anyhow, hoping Nebraskans are keeping an eye out for her: http://www.3newsnow.com/news/local-news/fbi-other-agencies-to-brief-media-on-sydney-loofe-case-on-thursday
52: Yes. I work for a company that makes Windows software, so the whole development department has to use Windows, but almost everyone uses Chrome because Edge chokes up on so many things.
Edge won't even run Silverlight, which seems awfully weird. I had to download IE onto my brand-new laptop to livestream something.
|| So, we're about half way through Godless. Folks watching it? |>
No, first I've heard of it. What is it? Any good?
85: No, not yet. But google tells me I might find Godless worth watching; it does sound intriguing.
Lately, I've been watching a bunch of Brit TV detective series, both retro and contemporary. Naturally enough, I've developed a weird crush on Kevin Whately (yeah, I would: by which I mean, yeah, I would totally marry "our Kev" and, you know, make babies with him, if you know what I mean, which is what I mean by "weird").
Also, Roger Allam as DI Fred Thursday in Endeavour, such a brilliant performance.
We watched episode one and will probably continue. Beautifully photographed; well acted given the limitations of the script. The usual gratuitous violence/gore. Watching with someone recovering from quite major surgery I was more than usually impressed by the ability of actors to recover from gunshot wounds/amputations and so on as if they were not much worse than really bad hangovers.
I am aware I sound like the opinionated soviet tank commander/socialist realist critic.
As usual with Westerns, insufficient attention paid to the trout population of all those gorgeous mountain rivers.
I'm a couple of episodes in. I'm not sure it's good, but it's certainly watchable. And it looks gorgeous, especially on a good TV.
87: I've also been binging British mysteries. I'm still convinced John Nettles's biological father was Polish. That is a Polish face if I've ever seen one.
What does smoking "wax" or "shatter" mean? Is that meth?
Google says it's just pot. Never mind.
I like John Nettle's acting, but the plots to that show get very repetitive after a while. I need to watch the ending of Hinterland because I stopped this summer after the (spoiler redacted).
I don't think the situation with the cousin-in-law is going to end well, though we'll hear what the FBI has to say later this morning. Such a tragedy. The same branch of Mr. Robot's family lost a young woman to kidnapping* back in the 1980s, so this has been even more traumatic than would be expected.
*Seemingly different circumstances--she was kidnapped off the street and never found. This was Mr. Robot's aunt by marriage.
Yes, it's horrible. My sympathies to Mr. Robot and his family.
Re: British mysteries, I thought Happy Valley (maybe more of a police procedural than a mystery) was amazing. Sarah Lancashire, the lead, was also tremendous in Last Tango in Halifax. Both are highly recommended.
I feel terrible for them. I'm very happy to hear of your improved ankle, however!
Oh jesus, how awful. I'm so sorry.
Those are both just horrible. I can't imagine having to live with either.
M/tch is crazy about both Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax. I've resisted them because I get tired of watching violence even when it's not gorey.
He's now rewatching Scott & Bailey, which is really good.
I was very disappointed by the first episode of Godless. I was expecting a town full of butch women making do without the menfolk and instead we get one scene of women constructing a church and then a whole bunch of dusty and interchangeable white dudes, a dead Native American man*, a woman accused of being a witch, and a lot tedious, unnecessary obfuscation that's meant to be suspenseful, I guess. Plus gore that's supposed to be edgy or something. I'm going to watch at least one more in the hopes that it'll get better, but obviously I'm doubtful.
On the up side, Lady Mary does a credible Amercian accent.
*Not a spoiler.
How does one negate a Mercian accent, and why would one even want to?
You focus on the Wessexian aspects.
I picked up some bargain dvd's of the old Agatha Christie movies from the 70s and 80s with Peter Ustinov as Poirot. I saw them on cable TV back in the 80s, but I'd forgotten how gleefully campy they were.
I didn't even know there was a non-David Suchet version.
Death On The Nile (the first Ustinov one, imitating Murder On the Orient Express, which had Albert Finney of all people as Poirot) was on the MOVIES! channel recently. What a cast! Mia Farrow as the unstable crazed wronged woman (of course). Angela Lansbury as the elderly novelist. Bette Davis as the elderly snob. George Kennedy as the exaggerated-American lawyer guy. Maggie Smith as the lesbian.
I looked it up. He doesn't even have good mustaches.
M/tch is crazy about both Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax. I've resisted them because I get tired of watching violence even when it's not gorey.
I love Happy Valley. But then, I'd watch Sarah Lancashire in just about anything, which is why I watch Last Tango in Halifax. I vastly enjoyed the first couple of seasons of Last Tango (not gorey, not even violent, really: not a detective drama, nor a police procedural), but then things got a little bit too soap-y for me. However, I continue to watch, because Sarah Lancashire.
And to return to the theme of Brit TV detective series, I'm currently watching Inspector George Gently, which is set in the North East (the North East of England, I mean) in the late 1960s, and which is absolutely brilliant.