Hello, neat project. I am also from Edmonton area. I wonder if we have talked previously, in the the late 90s I ran a local BBS system with my colleague.
The best part of the no-build, small-footprint approach is longevity: no dependency rot, nothing to maintain, and it'll still open and run in ten years. We've half-forgotten that "view source and hack it" is how a lot of us learned the web in the first place. Good to see tools that lean back into that.
A fair amount of software follows the model but does not use the term, everytime I go on the play store to look for an app I encounter many that offer a free version with limited features.
The term doesn't make much sense anymore because we don't share software, we just download it from the source. The business model makes more sense than ever, though.
Most of the shareware I got was downloaded from BBSes and the internet and even these central repositories that are the norm now are nothing new, in the 80s I went to a local BBS that was dedicated to shareware and in the 90s a handful of sites, and there was always the developer's site for the direct download but often they just linked you to one of the big repositories. The only shareware I can remember getting physically was the stuff that came on a disk/cd with some magazine I bought just for the CD filled with shareware. I miss those CDs.
For as long as I can remember shareware was more than the physical sharing, it was the model of a free version that you could share and a paid version and sometimes both versions were the same and it was just requested that you pay if you can (buy me a coffee). Some of this shareware was even adware, I remember getting some drawing program that had a popup every 15 minutes advertising the authors programs, it would go away if you paid; my first "hack" was realizing that I could start the program and then turn the computers date back a day giving me 24 hours and 15 minutes before the popup appeared, after a couple weeks my mom tasked me with fixing the computer, she was having to reset the date every couple days for some reason.
Majority of people are not downloading and compiling source code.
I meant more as an active use-term for software licensing that kiki uses (and in the sense of the OP's question), not in its historical sense that it is used by writers now.
I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.
I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.
I'm sorry you're dealing with this. I had an orange tabby also named Kiki for most of my childhood through early adulthood, 16 years. He suffered from kidney failure and it was a sad day when we had to put him down.
I'm sorry to hear about Kiki. She's very beautiful, thanks for sharing.
She reminds me of my tuxedo cat Bob who recently passed. I remember laying down all night in the comfort room before he had to be put down and sobbing knowing how much pain he was in. It's really hard.
I think a memorial site is a lovely idea, I created one for my cat as well: https://bob.duchastel.com
I wish we could get back to a “mom and pop” software market. Itch.io feels like it’s doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.
If selling software for money wasn’t such a pain in the arse I would put stuff on my website rather than itch.io
It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.
I am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO.
Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
> And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time.
Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms.
Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers.
Yep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.
If you accept cryptocurrency you don’t need to do any of this, and not even deal with PayPal (who WILL rob you without a second thought, as has been well documented on the internet for MULTIPLE decades at this point).
I would like to (Bitcoin Lightning only, with a healthy convenience discount) but I'd have to move off Hetzner for my servers because they are really against crypto in a very vague way, and again, that's a lot more work than just using itch.io
"It's built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos"
Does anyone do this?
Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.
include $_GET[...], register_globals, magic quotes, extract($_REQUEST), weak comparisons, loose typing, eval, risky file upload defaults/patterns, preg_replace /e, dangerous deserialization gadget chains, path traversal into includes, and the whole "URLs can be file paths" abstraction...
PHP is basically "RCE-as-a-Service" as far as I'm concerned. Allowing a URL in any function that wanted a file path was an absolutely bone-headed design choice. They made `curl | php` a language feature.
C and Go are two languages I feel like if you learn them, you can come back years later and if your memory is still good, you could get back up to speed pretty darn quickly. Every few years I go back to Go and try to build web apps using only the standard libraries, and I always find myself very quickly picking up all the concepts.
For some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.
It's the decades-old problem of blue on black, which has led to interminable discussions of which exact tint of blue should be ECMA-45 blue on a terminal. Pick one, it has poor contrast with a black background. Pick another, it has poor contrast with a white background.
It still doesn't reflect the design philosophy at all, though. A wacky approximation of early MacOS that offers nonfunctional UI affordances doesn't fit my bill of No obscurantist programming languages and styles, or simple, maintainable software akin to machines that need to work under all circumstances in the far north.
I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.
When you describe my programming and design philosophy as "the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design", I consider that the absolute best compliment I could have ever hoped for!
A "universal" approach to software design is the problem I am addressing, not the solution. Coming up with your own philosophy of design and implementation that works for you, and hopefully works for others, is how we get better software.
I'm not arguing with that, I think; I agree with your general sentiment and apparently read many of the same books you read as well. Yet I still believe there's value in a shared understanding of what quality software is, and what ideals to strive for in its conception.
> I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.
How would a universal approach to software design be in any way appropriate for this?
I like the general concept of software that treats its users as responsible adults, in the sense of not restricting them in how they can use the software; the analogy to machines that must work in remote areas with an extreme climate and no connection to the outside world is an apt one. Rejecting complexity in favour of maintainability, allowing to reach into and modify if necessary, those things I feel could be sharpened into proper, and universal guiding principles.
HN Guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. [...] Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Troll trots out the old "You should only be allowed the web site aesthetic I approve of and anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid!" and is shocked that not everyone on HN appreciates their insightful genius.
Obviously we have different monitors, but on mine the geneva-9 font doesn't render properly in the subpixels causing alternate green and purple, the underlines don't line up to the beginning of the words, and the whole thing stretches across the window the same way.
Could use some more attention to responsive layout though - too nav links aligned left flow into and overlap with top nav links aligned right. I’m on my phone right now so I can check but flex or plain old float could’ve solved that.
I prefer text over the whole width compared to websites that put all their content in the left 80 columns of the screen, taking up about a quarter of my screen width
Why does my screen need to be used less than it needs to? If you're only going to use 1/4 of my screen for your content, you could at least put a cute cat picture in the rest of it or something
My vision isn’t great and I do find it more difficult to read comfortably than most sites. I haven’t checked the actual contrast ratio, but for this particular font and size the text color feels like it’s lacking strong contrast against the background. The tabs at the top are even more difficult to read comfortably than.
But I understand that sites that look this way are not made for maximum legibility, but as an in-group signifier.
The text flows over the whole width is one point, the paddings and margins is another one. Sure, you can read this if you really want, but it's painful.
sure, but I prefer this layout to majority of big tech today.
Gives me flexibility and choice and does not punish me with 600px wide content box because majority of users have trouble grasping the concept of window management.
Fair enough, I'd say for niche content it may be okay, but for targeting broader audiences I'd guess you lose many readers with that readability on fullscreen browser windows (what most people will have in front of them while surfing I guess).
if you move your mouse to the edge of your browser window it turns into a little bidiretional arrow, if you click then drag you can make your window more narrow until it suits your desired reading preference
I'm not going to blame you _too_ much, since I had similar suspicion, but you could have (as I did) just downloaded the .zip file and examined the contents. In the shareware version, some things are probably missing (I think not all themes are there), but otherwise it's just a bunch of PHP files, no obfuscation or anything. The markup language is configured in a text file, and the parser for that file is just next to it. The configuration is used for configuring the markup parser, which is also present. And so on. It's not open-source only if your definition of OSS is "has to have a Github page".
Now that is a blast from the past.
Is much else distributed that way these days?
For as long as I can remember shareware was more than the physical sharing, it was the model of a free version that you could share and a paid version and sometimes both versions were the same and it was just requested that you pay if you can (buy me a coffee). Some of this shareware was even adware, I remember getting some drawing program that had a popup every 15 minutes advertising the authors programs, it would go away if you paid; my first "hack" was realizing that I could start the program and then turn the computers date back a day giving me 24 hours and 15 minutes before the popup appeared, after a couple weeks my mom tasked me with fixing the computer, she was having to reset the date every couple days for some reason.
Majority of people are not downloading and compiling source code.
Happy times
Used several times within the last month alone.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375691
Hear, hear. We need more of this kind of courage to start over from first principles.
I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.
I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.
https://ibb.co/7dRCnWrp https://ibb.co/1GWwDKLY
The kiki this software is named after, is an extremely rambunctious rotten kitten whom we adopted after our tuxedo passed away.
https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115742268356907140
:)
May you have peace during this time.
She reminds me of my tuxedo cat Bob who recently passed. I remember laying down all night in the comfort room before he had to be put down and sobbing knowing how much pain he was in. It's really hard.
I think a memorial site is a lovely idea, I created one for my cat as well: https://bob.duchastel.com
Dedicating a project to her sounds like a great idea.
If you use Reddit, I can also highly recommend the r/petloss subreddit for a bit of “group therapy”. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.
It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.
Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time.
Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms.
Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers.
[0] https://paddle.net
Does anyone do this? Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.
include $_GET[...], register_globals, magic quotes, extract($_REQUEST), weak comparisons, loose typing, eval, risky file upload defaults/patterns, preg_replace /e, dangerous deserialization gadget chains, path traversal into includes, and the whole "URLs can be file paths" abstraction...
PHP is basically "RCE-as-a-Service" as far as I'm concerned. Allowing a URL in any function that wanted a file path was an absolutely bone-headed design choice. They made `curl | php` a language feature.
I'm guessing this is made for a specific audience who dig this type of UI
https://www.cmsimple.org/en/
C and Go are two languages I feel like if you learn them, you can come back years later and if your memory is still good, you could get back up to speed pretty darn quickly. Every few years I go back to Go and try to build web apps using only the standard libraries, and I always find myself very quickly picking up all the concepts.
2. I don't think the website is _nearly unreadable_.
3. Pretty rude remark.
For me personally, the color scheme is uncomfortable to read. Dark text on a dark background
* https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_...
I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.
A "universal" approach to software design is the problem I am addressing, not the solution. Coming up with your own philosophy of design and implementation that works for you, and hopefully works for others, is how we get better software.
How would a universal approach to software design be in any way appropriate for this?
https://tomotama.com/kikidemo/
But I understand that sites that look this way are not made for maximum legibility, but as an in-group signifier.
Gives me flexibility and choice and does not punish me with 600px wide content box because majority of users have trouble grasping the concept of window management.
Cute page, but does not walk the walk.