Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go:
At its core,
form-saveris a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values inlocalStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by.
Not sure I buy the argument here, though I do very much look forward to local language models getting better so we can ditch the predatory peddlars of today’s slop. But this trip down memory lane to the early web of the 1990s could’ve been describing my own experience:
But the thing I do remember was the first time I came across Derek Powazek’s Fray online magazine. It was the first time I had seen a website look beautiful. This was without CSS and without Javascript. I still remember quite clearly an “issue” of Fray that used frames to create some kind of “doors” you could slide open to reveal an article inside.
Fray was what made me want to make websites:
I distinctly remember sites like prehensile tales, 0sil8 and the inimitable Fray triggering something in my brain that made me realise what it was I wanted to do with my life.
This is a neat project form Dries:
This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.
At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.
When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).
If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.
This is a handy little tool for spinning up a local web server when you don’t all the features of something like MAMP.
A great practical website to help you vote tactically in the upcoming local elections.
This is a very nifty use of a service worker—choose a local folder that you want to navigate using HTTP rather than the file system.
Collusion between three separate services owned by the same company: the Google search engine, the YouTube website, and the Chrome web browser.
Gosh, this kind of information could be really damaging if there were, say, antitrust proceedings initiated.
In the meantime, use Firefox
This is a great case study of the excellent California COVID-19 response site. Accessibility and performance are the watchwords here.
Want to know their secret weapon?
A $20 device running Android 9, with no contract commitment has been one of the most useful and effective tools in our effort to be accessible.
Leaner, faster sites benefit everybody, but making sure your applications run smoothly on low-end hardware makes a massive difference for those users.
The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?
We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.
This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.
Fellow Brightonians, here’s a handy one-stop shop for all the places doing deliveries right now, generated from this spreadsheet by Chris Boakes.
Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.
This is brilliant technique by Remy!
If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!
This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
Okay, I knew about the Python shortcut—I mentioned it in Going Offline—but I had no idea it was so easy to do the same thing for PHP. This is a bit of a revelation for me!
Once in the desired directory, run:
php -S localhost:2222Now you can go to “localhost:2222” in your browser, and if you have an index.html or .php file in your root directory, you’re in business.
Hui Jing describes her motivation for creating the lovely Penang Hokkien site:
People who grew up their whole lives in a community that spoke the same mother tongue as themselves would probably find this hard to relate to, but it really was something else to hear my mother tongue streaming out of the speakers of my computer.
She ends with an impassioned call for more local language websites:
If the Internet is meant to enhance the free flow of information and ideas across the world, then creation of content on the web should not largely be limited to English-speaking communities.
A clever use of localStorage to stop data from being lost when your visitors are offline.
A really deep dive into the lang attribute, and the :lang() pseudo-class (hitherto unknown to me). This is all proving really useful for a little side project I’m working on.
A directory of the regular science, technology, and creative events happening in Brighton.