newsonaut

Turning inner space into outer space

Site Updates category

Friday, July 10, 2026

Explore the hundreds of articles I have posted over the years

I’ve decided that Archive sounds dry and musty. It’s a rare reader who would venture into a section of a blog called Archive.

So I’m rebranding to Explore.

All my hundreds of post titles are still listed by date and you can click on them to read the articles.

But you can also filter those titles, do full article searches and, best of all, roll the dice for a random post.

I’m having a blast reading posts from ye olden times. Some are about hot new apps that have since disappeared without a trace. Some are about journalists or politicians who have long since left the stage.

But some remain relevant, even if it’s in a sad sort of way.

Three years ago, I rewrote some headlines so they would make more sense in a world where climate change should be top priority but still somehow gets short shrift.

I particularly like this one: Trump lawyer, Pence spar over best way to deal with climate change

It’s what they should have been sparring over. More likely it was something no one cares about.

I’m looking at other ways of exploring, the most obvious of which would be creating categories. But do I really want to go through hundreds of articles and create categories for them?

Still, I might poke away at it, keeping in mind the possibility that some posts might be left without a category.

Update: It turns out many of the older posts already had categories. This task many not be so daunting after all.


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Sunday, June 28, 2026

The many ways to explore blog posts from personal sites

I have a new page in the main navigation, but it took me three tries to give it a name that seemed right.

It’s basically a list of links to feeds that allow you to explore and discover blog posts from independent, personal websites.

In my opinion, you’ll find lots more interesting stuff to read there than you will on Facebook and the like.

In the end, I decided to call the page Indie. It’s the boring choice, but also the most likely to be understood.

(Edit: I decided to go even more boring: Links. It’s what they are, it’s what everyone understands.)

At first, I thought “alt web” would be cool, but I’m also pretty sure no on would understand it. And there is already an alt web that somehow allows you to publish directly in links. Hmm.

Then I thought “open web” would be a good contrast to “walled garden.” I might have stuck with that, but a bit of searching turned up a platform that is looking to commercialize the term.

Which is the opposite of what I am recommending. I don’t like the distorted kind of writing that comes with advertising and newsletter subscriptions.

These feeds highlight regular people saying the stuff they regularly say. It’s refreshing.


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Friday, April 4, 2025

Newsonaut comes home

Newsonaut has moved to a new hosting service and domain registrar. Normally, that wouldn’t be very exciting news, but it is for me — because the site has come home to beautiful British Columbia.

I’ve been using hosting services since the days of dial-up, and my fascination with the idea of making something that could be shared with the world.

My first hosts were actually ISPs that threw in some free web space for their clients. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen any more.

I was lured to a real host by TextDrive. It was unbelievably cheap and offered support for Textpattern, a free and open source CMS that I continue to use to this day.

The pricing was indeed too good to be true, and TextDrive went out of business. You can still visit a memorial site.

Forced to move on, I landed at InMotion Hosting, mainly because they at least appeared to promise to help with the move. That never happened. I just copied everything over and hoped for the best. Luckily, it worked out and I stuck with them for a couple of decades.

For my domain registrar, I went with GoDaddy. I can think of no other reason than that I fell for their marketing. I’m glad to have left because I can’t shake the feeling they were ripping me off one way or another.

Now, both my domain registration and web hosting are with StormWeb, a company based in Victoria, B.C., that has been around since 1998. Their servers are in Vancouver.

StormWeb actually did help me move. In fact, they did everything for me. I had to go out that evening, and by the time I got back, they were done.

They’ve been quite responsive to my questions, which are answered by people who know what they’re talking about.

It feels good to be home.


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Sunday, December 10, 2023

Sorry, I didn't know I was helping the trackers

I had trackers on my site and didn’t know until Safari told me it was blocking them.

In the privacy section of Safari settings, there are options to prevent cross-site tracking and hide IP address from trackers. When you visit a site, you can click to see how many trackers Safari blocked. Another click shows the domains of the trackers.

On this site, I found there was a tracker coming from Cloudflare. Turns out that Cloudflare hosts CDNs — content delivery networks — for a lot of the little extras developers like to add to their sites. In this case, it was Font Awesome.

I use Font Awesome because it’s an easy way to add icons. There aren’t many of them on newsonaut, but, still, that’s my habit.

I can’t say I blame Cloudflare for throwing in a tracker. If they’re going to host Font Awesome, they might as well get something out of it. And it looks like they have a use for that tracked data.

I got around their tracking by downloading Font Awesome, uploading it to my shared server and linking to it from there. Cloudflare has been deleted and will no longer attempt to track my visitors.

I checked my other sites, and discovered they too had trackers. Cloudflare not only had its tracker hitching a ride with Font Awesome, but also with Foundation — a framework for styling with CSS.

And there were more! An embedded video from YouTube came along with trackers. An embedded map from Flourish had trackers. Now that I know how widespread this practice is, I’m surprised Google Fonts doesn’t do the same thing.

Anyway, they’re all gone now. Uploading and linking to stuff from my server is less convenient, but — darn it! — I feel a lot better knowing that I’m not helping corporations invade your privacy.


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Monday, May 24, 2021

Now with more outer space than ever

It's the first redesign since newsonaut started in 2010. What took me so long?

I think I clung to the old design for so long because I thought it had a classic look that stood the test of time. But I was wrong. It was looking dated.

And there are a couple of other factors. First, the pandemic is at long last coming to an end. Second, I'm pretty close to retirement. Both of these things are cause for optimism and even celebration.

So newsonaut now has a brighter, bolder, outer-spacier new look.

Will anything else change? I'm thinking of focusing more on writing about the news and journalism, but that could change at any moment.


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Sunday, May 2, 2021

My other website got a major makeover

An old thriftmac T-shirt in all its dingy glory

thriftmac is a project that has been been kicking around since 2006 — almost an eternity on the internet. It's older than that if you count it's predecessor. There was a thing called Free for X for a couple of years.

It's a place where you can find 100-per-cent free Mac apps. It's not like the Mac App Store, where "free" might mean free trial or useless unless you pay for a subscription.

You can download these apps and use all the features for as long as you want. Yes, apps like this really do exist.

In its heyday, thrifmac was chock full of Google ads, bringing in $100 US on good months. It peaked at $200.

The site wasn't just a collection of links to apps. I blogged like crazy. Nothing was too trivial to write about if it involved a free Mac app.

I actually ran contests. thriftmac has a worm for a mascot (because apples sometimes have worms in them) so I ran a contest to name the worm. The winning name was Scrimpy, and the winner got a free thriftmac T-shirt.

Another contest was based on the Survivor TV show. I listed 10 apps I thought were only borderline deserving of being on thriftmac, and people voted in weekly rounds to eliminate one of them. The loser was OneButton FTP.

I wrote literally hundreds of articles until I finally ran out of steam. Since that time, thrifmac has existed for the several years as an app repository only — no blogging. (Although that might change soon.)

The thing is, the site is basically a database with a lot of useful information in it. thriftmac presents that database through a content management system called Textpattern.

That means it remains, after all these years, something to play with. What are the various ways I can present this database?

And so we have arrived at version five in 2021.

The biggest change for visitors — aside from the spiffy new look — is the switch from sections to categories. Before, you would have to click on one of eight sections, then look through the categories within the section.

Now, you can just go straight to whatever category you want.

Behind the scenes, I set several challenges for myself — challenges only a coder might appreciate.

  1. No divs. Much of the web code I see is littered with divs. I've seen tutorials where they have a div for the sidebar with a class of "sidebar" and a div for the main content with a class of "main." It's bizarre. Why not use the perfectly good tags we have available to us — aside and main.
  2. No classes. If you use semantic tags throughout, you can dispense with many classes. I managed to whittle them down to just one.
  3. No JavaScript. I've got nothing against JavaScript — in fact, I've used it to make a lot of fun staff. But I wanted to resist the temptation this time.
  4. Use grid and flex. I wanted to be done with bolting on third-party layout solutions like Bootstrap or Foundation. thriftmac now uses grid for layout, with a touch of flex.
  5. Creative use of CSS. There's a few touches so far, and I hope to sneak in a few more.
  6. No CDNs. I wanted to dispense with third-party dependencies, but I couldn't resist one Google font (Raleway, which was also used in the previous version of thriftmac) and Font Awesome. I thought about just using the generic sans-serif and letting people use whatever system font they have on their computer, but it seemed too lacklustre. I'm also a sucker for icons, and the site has precious few graphics otherwise. But that doesn't mean I'm using CDNs. I downloaded both, and they're being served up from the site.

I enjoyed the exercise, and I think the site looks pretty good. When it's a hobby site, it's really only your own opinion that counts anyway. And there's sure to be more tweaks coming.


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Thursday, March 7, 2013

Normal programming will resume shortly

There’s been a double whammy here at newsonaut headquarters.

First, physical renovations have made computer access dicey with construction going on all around it.

And second, we were booted off one web hosting company and onto another one. This caused a couple of problems in the back end that were tricky to figure out but, fortunately, easy to fix.

At least I think they’re fixed. Stay tuned.


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Sunday, February 17, 2013

Newsonaut responds to you and your device

If you’re reading on mobile, you may have noticed that newsonaut is responding to your device by reshaping itself. Yes, this blog has joined the trend to responsive web design.

It’s been tested over at The Reponsinator, which includes Apple, Android and Kindle devices, and in real life on an iPad and an iPhone 5. And it looks good — to me, at least.

Unfortunately, some of the projects (listed below in the footer) are not responding well. They often involve embedded code from a third party, so I don’t have any control over how they turn out. I intend to keep poking away at them, though, and with any luck have a responsive design in every nook and cranny of newsonaut.

I’ve also noticed that the viewport border doesn’t work so well in mobile. The bottom gets momentarily “stuck” when scrolling. I still think it’s cool, so I don’t want to give up on it. There may be a solution out there.

I dispensed with drop caps because removing them for phones, where they were way to big, was more of a nuisance than it was worth. But I may bring them back. The articles seem bare without them.

So how did I get it all done? With the help of a book called Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte. Plus a tip from HTML5 Rocks.


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Thursday, June 14, 2012

Opera broke my newsloops

Opera 12 — the forgotten web browser — was released today, so I figured I might as well download it and see the latest. Of course, the first place my ego told me to visit was newsloops — the forerunner to newsonaut. That may have been a mistake, because now I’m going to have to spend a bunch of time making Opera render the site properly.

Have a look at the images above. The shadow on the bottom of the first “o” is cut off as it swoop up to the second “o”. The shadow on the right side of the “s” is clipped. And the shadow on the date comes down too far, leaving an unsightly white space. The padding on top could use some help, too.

The date should be easy to fix with some Opera-specific coding. I had to do the same for Firefox. But I’m not sure if anything can be done to save the the letters. I thought I was clever using CSS to create the banner instead of an image — and I still think that, by golly, so I’m not changing it.

Stay tuned, Opera lovers. I’m committed to making things right for you.

By the way, Opera 12 seems super fast in my initial testing, so it may be well worth your while to give it a try if you haven’t already. Also, when I call it the forgotten browser, I mean forgotten by me — no offence intended.

Update: The dates have been fixed. I changed the coding to something simpler and more semantic, so Opera-specific coding wasn’t needed. I still have to target Firefox separately, though. As for the letters, I’m not optimistic about a fix — it may be a bug in Opera.


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