A Microblog in Plain HTML

Neocities got taken down by Namecheap on Friday because of an Indian court order targeting completely different matter.

We're working on the DNS outage. It's not technical - someone is trying to legally attack us and Namecheap took down the domain. More details later.

Early this morning, we received an email from @namecheap.com that the domain neocities.org was being suspended because of a court order from New Delhi, India (a jurisdiction we don't operate in), which was for an unrelated court order about a sports streaming site on a different domain.

So while #neocities was offline I had two thoughts floating in my head.

1. If I ever get a domain name, don't register through Namecheap.
2. There ought to be a law that protects hosts, registrars from liability, so the web hosting world isn't "guilty until proven innocent".

I say the situation resembles "guilty until proven innocent" because generally a platform getting taken down means people missing out on revenue, jobs, downloads, w/e. I know Neocities is low stakes compared to places like Patreon, Twitch, Etsy, but that's why I underlined 'generally'.

#neocities #programming

I read Qualities of Good Software by sundee

https://sundee.neocities.org/qualitysoftware/index.html

https://neocities.org/site/sundee?event_id=2771917

One thing this page reminds me of is that it's easier to get feedback on fanfiction than it is to get feedback on a program. So what's good for user experience isn't as obvious as what's good in writing.

There are many points I agree on. A really good example is how Photoshop (and GIMP) toolbox icons are grey when it would be much easier to pick tools if they had distinct colors. Though I think if followed it 100% e.g "As many options as possible", my code is going to get real unreadable and ugly; I write lots of if-else statements for configuration.

I'm going to open a tag for interesting articles I've found on #neocities starting with the articles I recently commented on.

https://temora.neocities.org/a/sentropy

https://neocities.org/site/temora?event_id=2707795

This article is about Sentropy, an automated abuse detection and removal system for social media sites. The company uses an algorithm and #artificialintelligence to analyze and pre-emptively remove "harmful content" for their clients.

This might sound positive to those ignorant of what may qualify or be omitted as "harmful content", but a legitimate concern is corporate and government interests getting between online interactions and real friendships. The author also did a great job of archiving articles published about Sentropy.

#neocities

I saw my website reached 100k hits on Thursday, but didn't quite have the time to post about it. The last few thousands have been a crawl, but my site seems to get about 200-300 hits per day even if I don't update.

The only explanation I can think of is a decent placement on a tag/category on neocities. But even as I have a bunch of hits, I feel like I don't know most of the people who visit my site. Regardless, thanks for visiting.