Today I came across PurgeCSS: a tool that allows you to rid your website of unused stylesheet rules. It seems to be very useful if you’re knee-deep in external CSS dependencies, brought in by the various frameworks and plugins used in websites these days. But preferably you don’t need a tool like this at all. This need is typical of the way modern web development is often conducted. You’re slapdash gluing a bunch of tools and libraries together. Mix it with your CSS framework of choice, say Bootstrap or Tailwind and after a bit of development you end up with a big ball of stylesheets, often 100kB or more. And that is when you reach for CSS processors like Less, minifiers and, yeah, PurgeCSS.

Last Sunday marked the end of another Awesome Games Done Quick: a weeklong speedrunning fundraising extravaganza benefiting charity. I absolutely loved it! If you don’t know GDQ I’ll summarize it for you: GDQ is a round the clock 7 day long event streamed on Twitch featuring a cast of great, funny gamers and commentators celebrating both old and new games while trying to finish them as quickly as possible. In the meantime people can donate and there’s a number of sweepstakes and incentives to try to generate as much money as possible for charity. There’s two main versions of GDQ, with AGDQ in the winter supporting the Prevent Cancer Foundation and a summer version aptly named Summer Games Done Quick that helps Médecins Sans Frontières. I have been watching both AGDQ and SGDQ for years and donate each time.

I have moved my weblog to the MetaArray at SDF. I will be using jelle.xyz as the site for my job as a freelance programmer, so I needed a new location for my blog. I’m very fond of SDF and love their stance on preserving old tech that deserves preserving. They are a big lot of *nix minded folks with great affection for terminals, NetBSD, Gopher and old school bulletin boards.

In the next couple of months I want to move all my old blog posts to this place. There’s some old weblogs floating about, and some archives I have backed up, and I want to bring that all here. After all that I might write about the stuff I’m doing these days and whatever sparks my interests.

Join our network

Microserviced my dismay
Loosely coupled
Sound design
Proven properties
Prove each time
This web is good
And I am fine

Reach my progressive API
And scriptures on your client
Show working servers, idle time
Grand and unreliant

Mass-approval crossing networks
Cached in storage localized
Your feelings are not even yours
My feelings are not mine

We view this microserviced corpse
We pass it thumbs and grime
But do not worry, we are here
And we are doing fine

PS: I have used the “undesigned” style for 4 years, but now switched to a light weight CSS design.

I recently read this blog post by Rick Carlino about fabulous text only websites and decided to redesign my blog, or more precisely: undesign my blog.

I have ripped out most of the CSS and used the styles from bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com as a starting point. HasClunk already outputs pretty minimal HTML5, so that’s good.

I’m quite happy with the result. In Lynx there’s not that much of a difference, but I really enjoy the lightweight look in the browser.

While I was at it, I also removed all the embedded music players from Soundcloud and Jamendo. They added all kinds of nasty JavaScript and tracking stuff to my site and don’t want to expose all my non-existing visitors to that kind of stuff :-).