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In the ongoing battle of site improvements and shoring up security, I finally managed to scratch a long-standing itch and signed the soylentnews.org domain. As of right now, our chain is fully validated and pushed to all our end-points.
Right now, I'm getting ready to dig in with TheMightyBuzzard to work on improving XSS protection for the site, and starting to lay out new site features (which will be in a future post). As with any meta post, I'll be reading your comments below.
~ NCommander
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soylentnews.org is now DNSSEC signed
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
And tomorrow will be like today, only more so.
-- Isaiah 56:12, New Standard Version
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:34PM
Congrats on the improvements. Don't go too nuts with new features though, I really like the way the current site works, and it works well in my oddball browser.
I can't even begin to count the sites that have turned in to useless rubbish because they wanted some new fangled "HTML5" or whatever fancy scripting toy happens to be the fad of the day.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:38PM
As the defacto QA department here at SoylentNews, I'd appreciate knowing what 'oddball browser' you use. Early on, I saw NCommander report he succeeded in loading the site using Mosaic! I don't have that to hand; I primarily use Pale Moon x86 on Win 7 Pro. I've been known to use Lynx (text-mode browser) on both Windows and Ubuntu Mate. Also have a copy of Opera available.
I cannot promise I'll be able to test your setup, but will certainly add it to the list of things I consider when performing tests and providing feedback to the developers.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday August 25 2016, @06:15PM
Don't laugh too hard: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.8.1.25pre) Gecko/20110912 SeaMonkey/1.1.20pre
It is the last Mozilla browser that will run under 95/98/ME/NT 4 (and even NT 3.51!) without something like KernelEX (98 only). And it includes a fix that for a while made that... other news site render OK-ish after adding HTML5 "section" tags, but they have gone even further down hill since then.
Downloadable from here: http://toastytech.com/files/95browsing.html [toastytech.com]
But about half the sites out there completely thumb their noses at me already now, so I'm not expecting anything.
(Why use it? Because I can!)
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 25 2016, @06:54PM
It probably won't be hard to get the newer Firefox's/SeaMonkeys to compile for antique NT if there was an actual demand for them. I actually got Firefox to recently compile for IRIX, only to be killed at the last possible moment by the linker being unable to handle >2 GiB of stuff at once which no amount of fiddling would fix.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday August 27 2016, @04:53PM
One of the most useful programs ever written, grep, is only 174K (on my system). I'm deeply suspicious of something over 2GiB. It can probably never be made secure, or fully understood even by its authors. Indeed it is probably chasing a fundamentally wrong design philosophy.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday August 27 2016, @05:59PM
Neither Firefox nor Chrome can be built with a 32-bit compiler anymore (Firefox has to use a 64->32 bit compiler last I checked). Most of this is because of the sheer amount of bloat that JavaScript and 'modern' web standards have become. Ultimately, what happened is after Java failed to deliver on the promise of write-once run-anywhere, the browser because a general purpose virtual machine for getting true platform independence. WebKit is several million lines of code; I won't be surprise if the browser in size exceeds more of the earlier versions of Windows in total LOC count.
Linux as a desktop platform became more viable not due to apps, but the fact the browser has become more or less the central repository where everything is done now. Even looking at my laptop, the only native apps I have installed are development tools, Steam+games, and browsers. Back in 2002, it would have had a slew of PIM software, CompuServe CIM for communication, Office, a USENET reader, and probably a lot more I am forgetting.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday August 25 2016, @08:46PM
Ummm, yeah. That does qualify as an 'oddball browser' in my book. Sadly, I have no system that I could run it on.
That said, if you do notice an unexpected change in site behavior, please let us know. (Probably the easiest approach would be to give a shout out on IRC [soylentnews.org].) No guarantees, but you never know when a small change could get things working again.
Many thanks for the feedback!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 25 2016, @07:14PM
Incidentally, it won't load in Mosaic anymore. No HTTPS support in most branches, and the few that do have it tend to only support SSLv3. Mosiac-ck MIGHT work. I dunno if he added TLS support into it.
Course, you could always use a proxy to get around that if need be or load it from tor (which uses http since Tor does its encryption, and SSL certs break with onionholes).
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @09:46PM
(Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday August 27 2016, @01:37AM
We are aware that rendering of SoylentNews on mobile browsers is quite poor. I can personally vouch for having many issues with Chrome on Android.
Since other sites can render well on mobile browsers, it would seem like something that we should also be able to do.
IIRC, @TheMightyBuzzard: took a stab at it once, but ran into some difficulties. Such as it being entirely possible for one person to view the site with a 19-inch monitor running at 1024x768 and someone else to view the site with a handheld 4K display. Apparently, one can make no assumptions between screen resolution and physical screen size. Add to that various rendering issues between different browsers and the rabbit hole just seems to get deeper and deeper. Further, for the most part, we try and run a lean site and have so far succeeded in avoided the need for any JavaScript to use it.
So, yes, it's a known problem, but with no clear way out. Unless there's a UI guru out there who would like to lend a hand?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @09:49PM
Will this help? https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag [mozilla.org]
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday August 28 2016, @02:00PM
Will this help? Good question!
I've seen this construct before, but never really looked into it. I followed that link, as well as: https://css-tricks.com/probably-use-initial-scale1/ [css-tricks.com] and have passed these on to TheMightyBuzzard. Hopefully he'll be able to make use of it. I might be able to play around with it a bit, but I'm working the next few days, so it may be a while before I can try anything. I've done some CSS stuff, but it is not my forté, so I can make no promises.
Thanks for passing this along!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday August 30 2016, @02:49AM
I know it's poor form to reply to myself, but I made a quick test update to https://dev.soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org] and included this line in the headers:
Then reloaded the dev server's home page as well as a couple story pages... and saw no change at all in how the pages displayed. (This was using Chrome on Android.) Loaded the same pages using Pale Moon on Win 7 Pro x86; saw no changes there, either. (Yes, I did view the page source and confirmed that the code had been added.) TheMightyBuzzard looked at the site on his mobile browser and said that he did not see any change, either. At that point, I backed out the change and returned the site to its previous functionality.
Wit is intellect, dancing.