Now

This page details what I’m up to at the moment. Last updated January 2024.

Compositional WMs

After having read On Compositional Window Management by Alexander Bandukwala, I’m thinking about ways to implement a subset of this paradigm using nested Wayland compositors, perhaps using Cage like in Drew DeVault’s Wio (unfortunately, Wio’s website is dead and the project seems abandoned).

Small websites

I’m trying to formulate my thoughts regarding the Web. As I’ve said in the past: I love building websites; I also hate the Web. I don’t hate the Web. I just hate what it has become. As a tool for expression and distribution of content it’s great! And that’s what it should be: a very nice document reader. But currently we’re treating it as an SDK of some sort. A universal application development toolkit. And I get that, but I completely disagree. I’m part of the problem tho; at my job I build webapps and CMSs. However, I’d like to be part of the solution too.

I’m thinking about how to build better websites. So far, I have a few important things:

• The less HTML and CSS, the more accessible and lightweight the website will be.
• Nothing beats static HTML in terms of speed.
• Use the low-tech solutions while building your sites: prefer CSS over JS and prefer HTML over CSS. And beyond that, prefer dedicated protocols (FTP, IRC, RSS) over writing a HTML interface.
• If you feel the need to write JavaScript, you’re probably building something that shouldn’t be a website.

I’m trying to build a workflow that I can build lightweight, small, accessible and sustainable websites with, which would still have the benefits that draws people to heavy tools like WordPress. I think there is some real potential and demand, especially from clients who care about the environmental costs of building websites.

Anyways, these are all some loose thoughts.

My own Search Engine..?

Is it just me, or have search results gotten really shitty? When I search for something, the only fucking results that I get are AI generated SEO bullshit. And I’m done with it.

I have been thinking about what I want a search engine to do. It should do basically this:

• Search Wikipedia. Apparently you can download the entirety of (English) Wikipedia in just 19GB (compressed). This is excluding any page history/talk pages, and the dump doesn’t contain media. But still, 19GB is not that much. It expands to around 90GB, but I think that’s manageable if I run it on a local server.

• Crawl and index Stack Exchange sites. Think Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Unix & Linux, Mathematics, and Ask Ubuntu.

• Optionally record my browsing history via a browser extension. This should be optional and contain a blacklist containing domains that shouldn’t be recorded — like search pages. Results from my own browser history should be less prominent.

• Crawl websites on the small web. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, this explanation from Marginalia Search describes it pretty well:

  Remember when you used to explore the Internet, when you used to discover cool little websites made by people and it wasn’t just a bunch of low effort content mill listicles and blog spam?
  In recent years, something has been simmering: Some call it the “Small Internet”. I hesitate to call it a movement, that would imply a level of organization and intent that it does not possess. It’s a disjointed group of like-minded people that recognize that the Internet has lost a certain je ne sais quoi, it has turned from a wild and creative space, into more of shopping mall. Where ever you go, you’re prodded to subscribe to newsletters, to like and comment, to buy stuff.

  There’s a bunch of small indexes and search engines like this. I was planning to curate my own index, based on existing indexes. There should also be an option for people to submit sites.

• Index some prominent Linux-oriented wikis, like the Arch Wiki and Gentoo Wiki. They seem to run the same wiki software as Wikipedia, so maybe they have a download option as well?

• Searching man pages and RFCs seems cool?

• Support for bangs, like DuckDuckGo has. I’d want !g for Whoogle results and !y for Invidious.

This hypothetical search engine would be mainly for personal use, but I wouldn’t mind putting it on a public site if I were to build it.

Update: I’ve come to the conclusion that what I really want is a something like Dash. However, it could still be interesting to build a search engine that searches everything I’ve read, by connecting to my RSS reader. Think something similar to Monocle.