Willow at large

New clearnet domain

Willow et al

2026-07-22 19:54

So, besides ICANN wanting to phase out .su by 2030, it looks like Russia is getting stricter with their domains. Basically since I'm not Russian, just a vaguely communist person who thinks a Soviet Union domain is pretty cool, it would cost me twice the price to keep willow.su, and I wouldn't be able to transfer it either. Fortunately, willow.al (as in Albania) is cheap and it gels as "willow at large". Unfortunately it looks like registration is handled manually lol. Also there's no WHOIS server, which I didn't even know is allowed :O

I don't like this domain as much as my .su but I guess all good things must come to an end.

Username systems, ranked

Willow et al

2026-06-17 22:42

Comments

When designing a platform with user-facing/public profiles, the way you go about handling usernames is important. Here I look at various systems for that.

A Case for Proprietary Software

Willow et al

2026-05-26 19:21

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I am a free software advocate, but I have limits. I can think of three reasons not to publish my own code or not to always use "free" licenses.

Types of post link trackers and how to avoid them

Willow et al

2026-04-17 21:09

Comments

Sometimes when you share a link to a video, post, or photo, the link includes tracking details that reveal a shocking amount of data to the platform owner when your recipient opens the link, or even just when you share it, depending on where you share it. I came up with two different types of link trackers, and how to avoid them (usually). We'll look at those, and then look at what they reveal, to whom, and when.

This is not a 24-hour clock

Willow et al

2026-04-16 22:40

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A 24-hour clock should cycle every 24 hours. Seems obvious right? But in a lot of apps, we get something like this:

The 24-hour time picker in Google Calendar, showing 23:00 at the same position as 1:00 but in a different ring.

This is basically two 12 hour clocks jammed together. It forces you to think in lowly 12-hour terms rather than thinking about what part of the entire day cycle you need.

Hello, world!

Willow et al

2026-04-15 23:27

Comments

The site

In case you missed the footer, this is using Nikola. I wanted something lightweight and fast, so I was gonna go with Hugo, but I find Go's text/template rather annoying to work with. So I tried out Pelican briefly, but apparently it doesn't do incremental compilation very well, and that is important to me. Next I looked at Nikola and I quite like it! It does support incremental compilation (although it's kinda slow to start up, so that may not pay off for a while) and it uses Jinja which I quite adore <3

The comments

Getting comments on here was quite a journey. I wanted something that federated over ActivityPub, so I first tried Pinka but I couldn't get it to federate properly. So then I tried Leah's Mastodon-API fetching script along with GoToSocial and a read-only API key. Turns out there's a bug in that script which doesn't allow top level comments from other servers. At this point I was running out of options, so I ended up just going with Isso, which is an old Python project that just does local comments and nothing else. I really wanted federation though, but I figure this is even lower friction because it doesn't require an account.