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Authentication on the web is a complicated problem. If you’re going to do it yourself, there’s a lot you have to take into consideration. But odds are, you’re building an app whose core offering has nothing to do with auth. You don’t care about auth. It’s an implementation detail. So rather than spend your precious time solving the problem of auth, you pay someone else to solve it. That’s the value of SaaS. What would be the point of paying for an authentication service, like workOS, then re-implementing auth on your own? They have dedicated teams working on that problem. It’s unlikely you’re going to do it better than them and still deliver on the product you’re building. There’s a parallel here, I think, to building stuff in the browser. Browsers provide lots of features to help you deliver good websites fast to an incredibly broad and diverse audience. Browser makers have teams of people who, day-in and day-out, are spending lots of time developing and optimizing new their offerings. So if you leverage what they offer you, that gives you an advantage because you don’t have to build it yourself. You could build it yourself. You could say “No thanks, I don’t want what you have. I’ll make my own.” But you don’t have to. And odds are, whatever you do build yourself, is not likely to be as fast as the highly-optimized subsystems you can tie together in the browser. And the best part? Unlike SasS, you don’t have to pay for what the browser offers you. And because you’re not paying, it can’t be turned off if you stop paying. @view-transition, for example, is a free API that’ll work forever. That’s a great deal. Are you taking advantage? Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
I have a standing desk that goes up and down via a manual crank. I’ve had it for probably ten years. Every time I raise or lower that thing, it gets my blood pumping. I often think: “I should upgrade to one of those standing desks that goes up and down with the push of a button.” Then there’s the other voice in my head: “Really? Are you so lazy you can’t put your snacks down, get out of your comfy chair, in your air conditioned room, and raise or lower your desk using a little elbow grease? That desk is just fine.” While writing this, I get out of my chair, star the timer, and raise my desk to standing position. 35 seconds. That’s the cost: 35 seconds, and an elevated heart rate. As I have many times over the last ten years, I recommit to keeping it — mostly as a reminder that it’s ok to do some things manually. Not everything in my life needs to be available to me at the push of a button. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
(I present to you my stream of consciousness on the topic of casing as it applies to the web platform.) I’m reading about the new command and commandfor attributes — which I’m super excited about, declarative behavior invocation in HTML? YES PLEASE!! — and one thing that strikes me is the casing in these APIs. For example, the command attribute has a variety of values in HTML which correspond to APIs in JavaScript. The show-popover attribute value maps to .showPopover() in JavaScript. hide-popover maps to .hidePopover(), etc. So what we have is: lowercase in attribute names e.g. commandfor="..." kebab-case in attribute values e.g. show-popover camelCase for JS counterparts e.g. showPopover() After thinking about this a little more, I remember that HTML attributes names are case insensitive, so the browser will normalize them to lowercase during parsing. Given that, I suppose you could write commandFor="..." but it’s effectively the same. Ok, lowercase attribute names in HTML makes sense. The related popover attributes follow the same convention: popovertarget popovertargetaction And there are many other attribute names in HTML that are lowercase, e.g.: maxlength novalidate contenteditable autocomplete formenctype So that all makes sense. But wait, there are some attribute names with hyphens in them, like aria-label="..." and data-value="...". So why isn’t it command-for="..."? Well, upon further reflection, I suppose those attributes were named that way for extensibility’s sake: they are essentially wildcard attributes that represent a family of attributes that are all under the same namespace: aria-* and data-*. But wait, isn’t that an argument for doing popover-target and popover-target-action? Or command and command-for? But wait (I keep saying that) there are kebab-case attribute names in HTML — like http-equiv on the <meta> tag, or accept-charset on the form tag — but those seem more like legacy exceptions. It seems like the only answer here is: there is no rule. Naming is driven by convention and decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. But if I had to summarize, it would probably be that the default casing for new APIs tends to follow the rules I outlined at the start (and what’s reflected in the new command APIs): lowercase for HTML attributes names kebab-case for HTML attribute values camelCase for JS counterparts Let’s not even get into SVG attribute names We need one of those “bless this mess” signs that we can hang over the World Wide Web. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
I’ve written previously about reloading a document using only HTML but that got me thinking: What are all the values you can put in an anchor tag’s href attribute? Well, I looked around. I found some things I already knew about, e.g. Link protocols like mailto:, tel:, sms: and javascript: which deal with specific ways of handling links. Protocol-relative links, e.g. href="//" Text fragments for linking to specific pieces of text on a page, e.g. href="#:~:text=foo" But I also found some things I didn’t know about (or only vaguely knew about) so I wrote them down in an attempt to remember them. href="#" Scrolls to the top of a document. I knew that. But I’m writing because #top will also scroll to the top if there isn’t another element with id="top" in the document. I didn’t know that. (Spec: “If decodedFragment is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string top, then return the top of the document.”) href="" Reloads the current page, preserving the search string but removing the hash string (if present). URL href="" resolves to /path/ /path/ /path/#foo /path/ /path/?id=foo /path/?id=foo /path/?id=foo#bar /path/?id=foo href="." Reloads the current page, removing both the search and hash strings (if present). Note: If you’re using href="." as a link to the current page, ensure your URLs have a trailing slash or you may get surprising navigation behavior. The path is interpreted as a file, so "." resolves to the parent directory of the current location. URL href="." resolves to /path / /path#foo / /path?id=foo / /path/ /path/ /path/#foo /path/ /path/?id=foo /path/ /path/index.html /path/ href="?" Reloads the current page, removing both the search and hash strings (if present). However, it preserves the ? character. Note: Unlike href=".", trailing slashes don’t matter. The search parameters will be removed but the path will be preserved as-is. URL href="?" resolves to /path /path? /path#foo /path? /path?id=foo /path? /path?id=foo#bar /path? /index.html /index.html? href="data:" You can make links that navigate to data URLs. The super-readable version of this would be: <a href="data:text/plain,hello world"> View plain text data URL </a> But you probably want data: URLs to be encoded so you don’t get unexpected behavior, e.g. <a href="data:text/plain,hello%20world"> View plain text data URL </a> Go ahead and try it (FYI: may not work in your user agent). Here’s a plain-text file and an HTML file. href="video.mp4#t=10,20" Media fragments allow linking to specific parts of a media file, like audio or video. For example, video.mp4#t=10,20 links to a video. It starts play at 10 seconds, and stops it at 20 seconds. (Support is limited at the time of this writing.) See For Yourself I tested a lot of this stuff in the browser and via JS. I think I got all these right. Thanks to JavaScript’s URL constructor (and the ability to pass a base URL), I could programmatically explore how a lot of these href’s would resolve. Here’s a snippet of the test code I wrote. You can copy/paste this in your console and they should all pass 🤞 const assertions = [ // Preserves search string but strips hash // x -> { search: '?...', hash: '' } { href: '', location: '/path', resolves_to: '/path' }, { href: '', location: '/path/', resolves_to: '/path/' }, { href: '', location: '/path/#foo', resolves_to: '/path/' }, { href: '', location: '/path/?id=foo', resolves_to: '/path/?id=foo' }, { href: '', location: '/path/?id=foo#bar', resolves_to: '/path/?id=foo' }, // Strips search and hash strings // x -> { search: '', hash: '' } { href: '.', location: '/path', resolves_to: '/' }, { href: '.', location: `/path#foo`, resolves_to: `/` }, { href: '.', location: `/path?id=foo`, resolves_to: `/` }, { href: '.', location: `/path/`, resolves_to: `/path/` }, { href: '.', location: `/path/#foo`, resolves_to: `/path/` }, { href: '.', location: `/path/?id=foo`, resolves_to: `/path/` }, { href: '.', location: `/path/index.html`, resolves_to: `/path/` }, // Strips search parameters and hash string, // but preserves search delimeter (`?`) // x -> { search: '?', hash: '' } { href: '?', location: '/path', resolves_to: '/path?' }, { href: '?', location: '/path#foo', resolves_to: '/path?' }, { href: '?', location: '/path?id=foo', resolves_to: '/path?' }, { href: '?', location: '/path/', resolves_to: '/path/?' }, { href: '?', location: '/path/?id=foo#bar', resolves_to: '/path/?' }, { href: '?', location: '/index.html#foo', resolves_to: '/index.html?'} ]; const assertions_evaluated = assertions.map(({ href, location, resolves_to }) => { const domain = 'https://example.com'; const expected = new URL(href, domain + location).toString(); const received = new URL(domain + resolves_to).toString(); return { href, location, expected: expected.replace(domain, ''), received: received.replace(domain, ''), passed: expected === received }; }); console.table(assertions_evaluated); Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
After shipping my work transforming HTML with Netlify’s edge functions I realized I have a little bug: the order of the icons specified in the URL doesn’t match the order in which they are displayed on screen. Why’s this happening? I have a bunch of links in my HTML document, like this: <icon-list> <a href="/1/">…</a> <a href="/2/">…</a> <a href="/3/">…</a> <!-- 2000+ more --> </icon-list> I use html-rewriter in my edge function to strip out the HTML for icons not specified in the URL. So for a request to: /lookup?id=1&id=2 My HTML will be transformed like so: <icon-list> <!-- Parser keeps these two --> <a href="/1/">…</a> <a href="/2/">…</a> <!-- But removes this one --> <a href="/3/">…</a> </icon-list> Resulting in less HTML over the wire to the client. But what about the order of the IDs in the URL? What if the request is to: /lookup?id=2&id=1 Instead of: /lookup?id=1&id=2 In the source HTML document containing all the icons, they’re marked up in reverse chronological order. But the request for this page may specify a different order for icons in the URL. So how do I rewrite the HTML to match the URL’s ordering? The problem is that html-rewriter doesn’t give me a fully-parsed DOM to work with. I can’t do things like “move this node to the top” or “move this node to position x”. With html-rewriter, you only “see” each element as it streams past. Once it passes by, your chance at modifying it is gone. (It seems that’s just the way these edge function tools are designed to work, keeps them lean and performant and I can’t shoot myself in the foot). So how do I change the icon’s display order to match what’s in the URL if I can’t modify the order of the elements in the HTML? CSS to the rescue! Because my markup is just a bunch of <a> tags inside a custom element and I’m using CSS grid for layout, I can use the order property in CSS! All the IDs are in the URL, and their position as parameters has meaning, so I assign their ordering to each element as it passes by html-rewriter. Here’s some pseudo code: // Get all the IDs in the URL const ids = url.searchParams.getAll("id"); // Select all the icons in the HTML rewriter.on("icon-list a", { element: (element) => { // Get the ID const id = element.getAttribute('id'); // If it's in our list, set it's order // position from the URL if (ids.includes(id)) { const order = ids.indexOf(id); element.setAttribute( "style", `order: ${order}` ); // Otherwise, remove it } else { element.remove(); } }, }); Boom! I didn’t have to change the order in the source HTML document, but I can still get the displaying ordering to match what’s in the URL. I love shifty little workarounds like this! Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
More in programming
It's time for a dev blogger's favorite topic: blogging about my new blogging setup. After migrating my blog from Hexo to Eleventy, building a photography website and creating a personal one-pager, it was time to find a new digital home for all my projects. If you notice any issue after the migration, please let me know. I redirect the RSS feed to the new domain, but you might want to update the feed URL in your reader. Motivation I've been maintaining three different websites under two different names: a mostly developer-oriented blog, a photography portfolio and a one-pager gluing everything together. When I started blogging about my sabbatical journey, I was thinking about making yet another page to create a clear separation. I've decided to do the opposite and merge all my websites into one instead. As I further reduce my dependency on social media and third-party services, it has become even more important to have my own space and practice POSSE. Every decision I've made was driven by two main goals: simplicity and personality. Setup I've stopped chasing the latest and greatest. I want to keep the setup as clean as possible, which means pulling fewer dependencies. Every package adds complexity and maintainability costs, so I've only added what was necessary — no more Gulp, Sass or Tailwind. Instead of taking one of my existing websites as a starting point, I created this project from scratch. I reused some of my previous code, but I didn't want to take over any technical debt (especially with the advancements in CSS). The foundation of this website hasn't changed: Eleventy (Build Awesome). It covers the fundamentals of a static site and offers a great level of customization. I've made my project more and less dependent on Eleventy at the same time: I replaced Gulp as my build pipeline with pure Eleventy processing. I replaced most shortcodes with Markdown alternatives (and markdown-it plugins), which are better supported by editors like Obsidian. I've also replaced the Nunjucks template engine with Liquid, which comes with a few trade-offs. The main reason was to avoid creating a new collection for every set of posts I render. With Liquid, you can apply array functions like filtering or sorting in the template itself: {% assign drafts = collections.all | where: "data.isDraft" | reverse %} {% for draft in drafts %} … {% endfor %} Another advantage is having date formatting included, so I don't need another library or custom code. You can even set a default date format, so you don't have to provide it each time. What I don't like is the verbosity of the template language, although I've gotten used to it by now. Nunjucks: {{ "/tags/" + tag + "/" }} {{ modified or created or date }} {% set perspectives = ["dev", "photography", "life"] %} Liquid: {{ "/tags/" | append: tag | append: "/" }} {{ modified | default: created | default: date }} {% assign perspectives = "dev, photography, life" | split: ", " %} After migrating my existing content, I've noticed the build taking way too long, both in the dev server and the production build. I've found out that the Eleventy template cache is turned off for Liquid by default. This was useful during development, but when updating actual content, it caused every template and partial to be constantly recalculated. After turning the cache on, this issue was resolved: eleventyConfig.setLiquidOptions({ cache: true }); Check the colophon for the full tech stack overview. Perspectives The main challenge was finding a way to separate and present my main personas. The Venn diagram intersection of people interested in software development, photography and my personal life is probably small. I could use tags, but they don't offer the level of personalization I was looking for. Most personal blogs separate the content by post type (blog post, note, photo), but this doesn't fit my use case. Instead, I've decided to structure my website around three perspectives, a term I have borrowed from the Eclipse IDE. Each perspective comes with its own avatar, tagline and bio. If someone is interested in everything I share (hi Mom!), they can still view all my posts. Design Since building my photography website, I've made many changes, but I never got around to share an update. The biggest change was the design, which I have used as a blueprint for the new website. I've decided to mimic a social timeline/feed, which most people are familiar with. At the same time, it should be clear that it's a personal website and not yet another walled garden. Typography is an important part of every design. The first step is to choose between a system font stack and a custom font, which comes with the usual performance vs. personality trade-offs. I've decided to go with a uniform look across all devices. I've settled on Source Sans 3 for copy text and Hack for code. Another big change was introducing a sidebar. I always felt like the empty horizontal space was "wasted" on a desktop device, but getting the sidebar UX right is challenging. I'm happy with the result, especially with the last two panels adding a personal touch to the design. Images I've made several changes to the handling of image files. To make them compatible with Markdown editors, I had to replace my custom picture shortcode. The official Eleventy image plugin is a popular choice, but it violates my simplicity goal and doesn't support everything I needed. I've decided to go with a plain Markdown image markup and a single image file (no format fallback or 2x version for retina displays). Additionally, I wrote a markdown-it plugin to turn the optional title parameter into a caption. As for the file format, both WebP and AVIF have excellent browser support. For each image, I select the format based on the quality and file size. For my photos, I'm using WebP for the timeline thumbnails and JPG for the full-size version. Theme picker There have been some recent discussions about dark mode toggles, and I considered going for a light/dark solution based on the user's OS preference. Driven by the personality goal, I knew I had to add at least one more theme, so a proper theme picker was necessary. Similar to navigation, people like to hide the theme selection on mobile devices behind a burger menu or a dropdown. I prefer the solution by Sarah L. Fossheim, where all available themes are displayed above the page footer. A friend was scrolling through my new website, and their first question was "Why is the theme picker in the footer?". This tells me the solution was a good idea — I don't think he would have noticed a typical theme button in the header. The implementation follows standard practices: Use the light or dark theme as default based on the user's OS or browser preference. Store a selected theme in the local storage and use it as the single source of truth. Prevent a flash of inaccurate color theme. Make the theme play nicely with bfcache. I might have slightly gone overboard with my third theme, but the nostalgia kept me adding more and more features. Enjoy going back to the 90s: Feeds As browser vendors decided to remove XSLT support, I didn't bother to style my feed. Instead, I've created a new web feeds page, listing all available feeds and a short explanation. I provide one feed for every perspective and one with all my posts combined. I once offered tag-based RSS feeds. This was useful for my sabbatical, but even there I had only a single subscriber. Now, all tag feeds redirect to their main perspective feed. I've also dropped the JSON feed, despite having at least 16 subscribers. Given that every web feed reader supports Atom feeds, I don't see the value of providing a JSON alternative. A JSON feed doesn't add much complexity, but handling different media types (post, photo) and properly escaping the content is one more thing to implement and maintain. Quality assurance I've put a lot of effort into my new digital home, and I want to make sure it stays in good shape. I've included several tools, most running automatically as part of the CI pipeline: eleventyDataSchema — lint Eleventy data values like titles or dates markdownlint — format/lint Markdown files Vale — lint content (grammar, writing style, formatting) Lychee — find broken links (internal and external) Evaluatory — check accessibility and validate HTML Oxlint — lint JavaScript files Eleventy linters are another option to analyze a template's output, but I haven't found a use case for it yet. Not everything can be automated, so I also did the following manually: Test with Chrome, Firefox and Safari Test with Polypane Test with Google Lighthouse Test with a screen reader Test with JavaScript disabled Test with CSS disabled Test at 200% zoom Test with a bigger browser font size Test with custom fonts disabled Test with delayed assets Performance It's difficult to compare the performance of two separate websites with that of a combined one. Some parts got worse, e.g. bigger font files and more CSS. At the same time, I've noticed that gzip compression was turned off for anything but HTML for a few years now (I must have missed it when upgrading nginx) 🙈. One improvement was to implement on-demand assets. For example, the lite-youtube-embed CSS and JavaScript is only loaded if a <lite-youtube> element is present on the page. As before, JavaScript is fully optional (except for interactive demos in individual posts). I've been using a mix of <noscript> and CSS to hide elements that require JS (like the theme picker). I don't like the user experience of pagination, so I avoided it for years. But now that I have almost 300 posts, I've decided to finally add it. I display 30 posts per page, with images further down still being lazy-loaded for better performance. I haven't applied pagination to tag pages, as that's more complex with Eleventy. Bits and pieces Here are some other noteworthy changes: I've removed post-specific social share images and use a single WebP Open Graph image instead. I've dropped JSON-LD. Open Graph and microformats are sufficient. "Naming is hard" is a common expression in software development, but it also applies to photograph titles. I've decided to use a counter as the title, e.g. #0100. Sometimes I do come up with a title that I love, like the Castle in the Sky, so I might mention it in the description. On a photo page, you can now open the previous/next photo using the left/right arrow keys (in addition to the existing navigation buttons). It's now possible to filter photos by date, gear, or location. Check the explore page for an overview. I've learned about and used some experimental CSS features (with progressive enhancement), like scroll-triggered animations or squircle corners. I've added an AI statement on my LLM usage. I finally have a proper about page. Cool URIs don't change, but it's inevitable when moving to a new domain. All my previous URLs are redirected, except for some assets that are no longer used. I will keep the old domain, so the redirects will continue to work for a foreseeable future. I've kept my previous Easter egg and added a few more. Have a happy hunt! 🕵️♂️ Inspiration I visited hundreds of personal websites looking for inspiration. Here are a few that I kept coming back to: Emma Goto. I love Emma's approach to presenting the variety of her interests, even though I went a different route. Brennan Kenneth Brown. This website has so much to offer. It's a great example of what the open web looks like. Rex Barrett. The sentence "Collecting hobbies is my hobby." hit home — so much that I had to steal borrow it for my short life bio. Conclusion This project was mostly about merging the content of two websites into one. I knew this would take a considerable amount of time, but I still greatly underestimated the effort. In the end, it was all about the journey, not the destination. I loved fine-tuning the design and tweaking little details that probably no one will ever notice. I still have many more ideas left in my backlog. How do you like my new digital home? If you have an opinion, let me know! Reply via email
New electronica album by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
To protect against link rot and disappearing content, I save local copies of web pages I like into my web archive. Ideally, this archive is completely self-contained. I want a local copy of each page’s HTML and all the assets it depends on (CSS, images, scripts, and so on). I don’t want my archived pages fetching resources from the original website, which could disappear at any time. Initially, I was verifying self-containedness by hand. I’d open each saved page in a web browser, and check the browser dev tools. I’d check the Console tab for errors and failed requests, and watch the Network tab for requests going out to the internet. That approach was tedious and error-prone, and I wanted something better. I now automate the process using Playwright, a testing framework that allows you to control web browsers. I open each page using Playwright, and check if it’s making external requests. Detecting external requests in Playwright When you open a page in Playwright, you can subscribe to request events which tell you when the page issues a request. In this Python snippet, we start Playwright, start a WebKit browser, and open a new page. We tell the page to append external requests to a list, and then load example.com. We see that example.com makes two requests on page load: one for https://example.com, and one for a JavaScript file. from contextlib import closing from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, closing(browser.new_page()) as page, ): requests = [] page.on("request", lambda msg: requests.append(msg)) page.goto("https://example.com") print("requests:", requests) # requests: [<Request url='https://example.com/' method='GET'>, # <Request url='https://example.com/s.js' method='GET'>] In a more complex scenario, we might use Playwright to interact with the page after loading – for example, clicking a button or filling in a form, and then we could see the requests triggered by each action. Once we have a list of requests made by the page, we can inspect the url property to check if any of them were fetching from an external website. I wrote a function is_external_request to carry out this check: from playwright.sync_api import Request import urllib.parse def is_external_request(req: Request, original_url: str) -> bool: """ Check if a request has a different origin than the original URL. A request is considered internal if: - it matches the original URL exactly - it has the same scheme, host, and port as the original URL - it uses a `blob:` scheme (for example, in-memory media representations) """ if req.url == original_url: return False # Compare the scheme/host of the request to that of the original URL. org_url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(original_url) req_url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(req.url) if org_url.scheme == req_url.scheme and org_url.netloc == req_url.netloc: return False # Ignore blob: URLs, which are in-memory representation of some data, # and not an external request. # # Playwright detects blob: URLs when loading media files; for example # using the <audio> or <video> tag. if req_url.scheme == "blob": return False # Fail open: if we can't decide if a request was internal or external, # assume it was external. return True assert_page_is_self_contained(ctx, url) I’ve wrapped these two steps in a function assert_page_is_self_contained(ctx, url), which is part of my chives utility library. The function takes a Playwright Browser (or BrowserContext) and a URL, then: Opens a new page in the browser Loads the URL in the page Checks what happened when the page completes loading It throws an exception if there are any: Uncaught page exceptions or errors Console warnings or errors Non-GET requests Requests targeting external resources The function tries to trigger important network requests that might be skipped on the initial page load. For example, it evaluates the body’s offsetHeight to force a synchronous reflow, which causes the browser to request any lazily loaded images or fonts that might otherwise be missed. Here’s an example which verifies a file example.html from the working directory: from chives.browser_fixtures import assert_page_is_self_contained, file_uri from contextlib import closing from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, ): assert_page_is_self_contained(browser, url=file_uri("example.html")) I originally passed a Page as the first argument, but changing the function to take a Browser or BrowserContext lets it manage its own pages. It gets a fresh page for every verification, and closes it when it’s done. (The first time I ran this, I created a new page for every verification, and never closed them – my computer ground to a crawl as my script opened hundreds of browser tabs.) If you create a new context, you can emulate different browser settings, like location, locale, and window size. Here’s an example where we use contexts to test the same page in light/dark mode: with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, ): with closing(browser.new_context(color_scheme="light")) as light_ctx: assert_page_is_self_contained(light_ctx, url=file_uri("example.html")) with closing(browser.new_context(color_scheme="dark")) as dark_ctx: assert_page_is_self_contained(dark_ctx, url=file_uri("example.html")) In my web archive, I check every page in light/dark mode, and at 1×/2× pixel densities. It takes at least a second to run each verification, so I cache the results. As I save new pages, they’re added to a verification queue, and I’m warned of any missing assets. Unsurprisingly, the first run flagged many missing fonts and images, which I added to my local archive. Every saved page now passes cleanly. Browser is best-effort, but may still miss things Even with automated testing, it’s difficult to guarantee a completely self-contained archive. Different instances of a browser might load different assets, and a single page load might miss different variations: Responsive images – web pages can offer different sizes of an image, and the browser chooses a specific size based on the current window dimensions Appearance settings – a browser might load different fonts or images depending on light/dark mode Interaction-dependent assets – a web page might have assets that are only required on hover or user action You can mitigate some of this by testing with multiple contexts or adding post-load interactions, but every step makes the process take longer. Fortunately, most of the pages I save are simple, blog-style pages where I’ve stripped out the JavaScript. For my specific use case, initial load verification is more than good enough. Other uses for this code There are other projects where it could be useful to intercept and audit the requests made by a web page: Verifying your Content Security Policy (CSP). The CSP header restricts what resources can be loaded by a web page, and you could check that your configuration has the correct effect. Auditing login screens. You could check that sensitive pages don’t load any external scripts, which mitigates the risk of credential theft via a compromised third-party. Testing analytics and tracking. You could script user flows, like a shopping cart checkout, and confirm that tracking events fire correctly. I don’t do much front-end web development, but Playwright has become a key tool in my toolbox. I read a lot about people using AI agents and MCPs to interact with websites, but I prefer Playwright. It’s more fiddly and requires explicit instructions, but it’s constrained, deterministic, and I never have to worry about it doing something unexpected. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
It’s four years since I bought a printer. I thought I would provide an update on running costs, print sales, and profit. I’m happy to be completely transparent about all this as I know it can be difficult to figure this out if you are thinking of creating your own printing business. January 11th 2026, 11:30am All the photos here are work shot in the last twelve months. Year Four Investment? Nothing other than consumables this year. I did purchase a high-spec film scanner last year, detailed here, but don’t consider that as part of this. The scanner has paid for itself several times over, and it may become a factor in future years (see below). Income Income is made up of sales through a local gallery that I am part of, along with web sales: 5,940.- CHF - sales through the gallery 80.- CHF - sales through web shop = 6,020.- CHF total income Total income is down about 50% compared to 2025. Costs I had to purchase consumables (paper and ink), at a total of 957.- CHF. That cost is included in the total here under the “print consumables” category. January 11th 2026, 3:30pm Rental cost of space in the gallery was reduced due to having overpayments of rent and my loan to the gallery, from the previous year(s), paid back to me. -1,500.- CHF - rental cost of space in the gallery -957.- CHF - print consumables (paper, ink) -1,138.- CHF - framing/mounting/postage -1,135.- CHF - commission to the gallery -300.- CHF - web shop subscription 0.- CHF - stripe / paypal fees 0.- CHF - advertising (none this year) = -5,030.- CHF total costs Total costs are down by about 60% compared to 2025. Total Profit 6,020.- CHF total income -5,030.- CHF total costs = 990.- CHF total profit A Quiet Year? Actually an average year. The previous couple of years were outliers, due to large orders, so really I’m back to normal in terms of sales. The key factors in managing to generate a [small] profit this year were: 1) no longer having to pay back the loan used to finance the printer, and 2) reduced rental cost of space in the gallery due to a previous loan to it being repaid. Also having to spend almost 1,000.- CHF on ink this year ate into profit. This is probably a “once every three years” cost given the rate I print at. The principal cost is rental of space in the gallery - in a normal year this would be 3,000.- CHF. Essentially this means, given the material cost of printing and framing/mounting and commission to the gallery, I need to make about 5,500.- CHF of sales to break even. Solar Eclipse, August 12th 2026 That’s a grind. However I did receive two substantial orders at the end of October, which haven’t made it in to this year’s figures and should boost next year’s. Maybe even a good sign for the year to come? At least now the original investment loan is repaid, the printing costs cover themselves in most years. I may look at offering scanning services now that I have a high-spec film scanner, which could become a scan + print service. More thoughts about that next time.
