#asciilifeform | 2022-01-02

you'd stand out like a sore thumb in Atlanta tho, smoking hellcats in a ute

06:51

free tramampoline in alabama? you're still the first one there

~ 21 minutes ~

07:12

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-12-31#1070763 cool pen name for a blogger. blackbeard's name went before him

07:12

dulapbot

Logged on 2021-12-31 22:43:29 mats: teach was the pirate blackbeard

07:21

verisimilitude, have you got a notebook? time away from machines is invigorating

07:34

the notebook & bipedal motion are the two best inventions. ever

07:36

128 pages of tranferrable potential

07:42

here's a TM. you're never more than 50 paces from something you've never seen b4

~ 2 hours 41 minutes ~

10:23

http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2021-12-29#1001504 << billymg, my own noob experience re a blog theme: personally i've had the font one pain point. wanted something that has unambiguous oO0lI1 while not fixed-width, and also numbers with uniform height bases (for example, for a font that styles a '3' a bit like a 'g', 2<sup>32</sup> becomes a visual puzzle). haven't completely solved yet the font issue for myself

10:23

bitbot

(pest) 2021-12-29 billymg: i didn't spend more time debugging because i figured i could just throw more hardware at it. i've been working on some other things, including a new blog theme that's almost ready to publish, and a "v2" of the crawler www, which is probably a bit further out

10:23

fwiw, also not sure why would anyone want to fix the (maximum) blog width. why not let the reader decide with his own viewport? (not that i never saw people browsing the net with a maximized window, on a horizontal 16:9 monitor, unaware or mysteriously unwilling of manual viewport adjustment...)

~ 7 hours ~

17:24

cgra: your comment re: font prompted some digging and i found something that might work for you. it turns out some OpenType fonts include alternate characters that can be enabled in CSS via `font-feature-settings`, and the IBM Plex font apparently

17:24

leverages this feature to include unambiguous 1lI and oO0 characters. it's available in monospace, serif, and sans-serif versions

17:24

the font i selected for my theme includes this feature for zeros and ones, but not for capital-i and lowercase-L

17:28

regarding viewport width, i personally like a fluid width layout but with a max-width constraint so that if/when your site is ever opened on a wide monitor you don't get mile long lines of text. i suspect this is one of those things that will always come down to personal preference though

17:33

cgra: i actually just now pushed the theme to my www if you'd like to take a look, it should perform well on anything from a phone up to a large monitor (and anything in between). i made this theme primarily for myself but i'd love it if others decided to use it as well

17:35

if anyone likes it and is interested in using it but wishes it just had/did X (e.g. always flowed to 100% width), let me know and i could perhaps include some extra knobs in the released vpatch

~ 1 hours 38 minutes ~

19:13

billymg: is a font (these days?) something you can include in your website and even configure like you suggested, and expect it to work reasonably well for all visitors? i guess it may come down to a target audience -- then let's say at least somewhat technically literate readers

19:21

cgra: yes, it's been supported in all the major browsers for quite some time now

19:24

that `font-feature-setting` attribute was new to me, but even that looks like it's been supported since chrome 48, ff 34, etc.

19:32

apparently quite a few extra knobs to choose from in the complete spec: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/featurelist

19:44