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standalone FXP web site [message #4] Tue, 18 April 2017 16:42 Go to next message
connie is currently offline  connie
Messages: 28
Registered: January 2017
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Freenix Ninja
thanks to KRT, we now have an unofficial fully-functional standalone FXP image download & repo access site: https://freeslack.space/

this is very much a work in progress, especially since the official distribution name is in the air. the latest modifications included replacing Font Awesome[sic] clipart by images, which precipitated the following rant by yours truly:

Quote:
am I the only one sickened by the web designers' propensity to use the private use areas of utf 8 for public web-facing clipart? they are nuts! there are only 2 problems with that:

if a public web site assumes i have a font installed which has the same private use area glyphs as they do, fuck them.

if a public web site assumes i do NOT have a font installed which has DIFFERENT private use area glyphs, fuck them twice.

but of course these are the running assumptions, so they are basically hijacking the standard by misusing the private use areas.

last time i checked, there were 840000 unused codepoints in utf 8. awesome font implements 675 icons. web designers (of all genders) should just grow some chest hair and go back to using gifs, while their proposals for expanding the standard clipart pages are pending.
Re: standalone FXP web site [message #5 is a reply to message #4] Wed, 19 April 2017 22:53 Go to previous messageGo to next message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
Howdy folks...

Indeed, it's been an interesting learning lesson. I am by no means a professionally trained web-designer, nor a coder, nor a developer. Everything I know about computers in general has come through sheer explorations driven by my own curiosity. I'm lucky enough to have spent my University time in a department that was thoroughly dual-boot, so that by the time I finally wound up with a degree (despite my seeming best efforts not to), I had been bitten by the Linux bug pretty hard. Combine that with the fact that this was also a time before Faceboogle had caught on to the degree it has, so that it was common practice for anyone involved with the department to set up and maintain their own website on the school's servers as a profile page for the department.

Fast forward to now, and I am neck-deep in web-related projects that I never fully intended to take over in the way that I have. My current waking nightmare is WordPress. Not the base code so much, but the edge cases of what can go wrong when you cram 20+ years worth of material into a single MySQL database. The darn thing won't export now.... But that's another project entirely.

As for the freeslack.space site, the goal there was to have something that could run without any javascript whatsoever, and still look good enough for the average person to get a "modern" feel out of it. It's been a project of pure fun and enjoyment for me. And I've learned a lot in the process. To add to what was mentioned in the previous post, I dug into web fonts and icons and such like I've never done before. I had heard about Font Awesome in passing, but I didn't know what it was all about.

A while back on one of the GNU mailing lists (linux-libre perhaps? I forget which one exactly), the PureOS developers had been trying to get their OS to meet the FSDG (of which I am still in the process of groking the finer points). Part of that process was for them to make a standalone website that had no affiliation to the related Librem project selling laptops. I won't go into the politics of all that here, it's a separate discussion entirely. The good thing that came out of it was the PureOS.net website, which was very close to the direction I personally wanted to go in for my own websites. And wouldn't you know it, they released the whole thing under the CC-BY-SA-4.0. Nice. So I just ripped the whole thing with wget, started replacing the bits of code that needed replacing.

Aside from some copy tweaking and image adjusting, there wasn't much to be done in the way of making it work in the way that we had discussed over email. There was the one interesting thing though. With javascript turned completely off at the browser level, the site worked like a charm, as intended. But with NoScript turned on with all the defaults, the icons on the buttons would turn into blocks of crud. After determining that this was not a javascript issue, I was able to determine that NoScript was blocking the web font icons (i.e. Font Awesome), even though they were originating from a local directory (same domain) and being called through the CSS file.

[0]

To see this behavior in action, visit both pureos.net and freeslack.space with NoScript turned on with default options. Where you see ugly blocks of crud on the PureOS.net site, you should see the proper icons in their place on the freeslack.space site.

The solution was simple. I just replaced the CSS class calls with image links to *.png versions of the same icons I was after, using icons found at an MIT-licensed repository for this exact purpose.

[1]

Also, while I was learning about all of this font business for basically the first time, I came across this:

[2]

After reading that and a few more links, I started to wonder why anyone would even bother with Font Awesome. Button images don't seem all that hard to figure out. That's like HTML 101, isn't it?

It makes me pine for the days when we could get away with text-based websites, like my old FreeSlack notes page:

[3]

(grain of salt here, some of that info is outdated, and I plan to update that page when I can create spare time out of thin air, or at least hone the skills of time-control. I digress....)

The point being, when it comes to "web design" I personally tend to Keep It Super Simple, and strive for something that can be rendered on all browsers and platforms (even old dusty outdated stuff in third world countries on horribly slow dial-up). To me, it's a form of net-neturality. If I create a website that requires Flash or tons of javascript from all over the place, or else has hooks into every social network in cyberspace, then I am alienating anyone that has a slow connection, or a less-than ideal browser, or outdated plugins, let alone someone trying to surf the web as "libre" as possible, if that's even a thing.

Plus, it's a standalone site, more or less. You can rip the whole thing in under 5 minutes with wget and host it directly off of your hard drive without any net connection whatsoever. Of course the external links won't work, but everything else should load just fine. That way, it's easy to move around and mirror on other servers with just a simple upload.

Forgive me if I'm making something complicated out of a simple "web font icons" issue. This is how I learn, I guess. And it's been a fun ride so far...

The next step is to clean up the code so that it gets a clean bill of health for HTML and CSS validation. From my previous experience, this can be quite a feat, depending on the original code for the site. As it now stands, I get 15 HTML errors [4] and 28 CSS errors [5]. Compare that with 6 HTML errors and 46 CSS errors for the mother code at pureos.net. I can easily clean up the HTML errors by removing some name attributes and adding alt text to the button images I spliced in there. The CSS errors will take more investigating, it's not my first language.

I think I'll stop here. For now at least.


Re: standalone FXP web site [message #6 is a reply to message #4] Wed, 19 April 2017 22:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
First post by a new member? Embarrassed
Re: standalone FXP web site [message #7 is a reply to message #6] Wed, 19 April 2017 22:57 Go to previous messageGo to next message
connie is currently offline  connie
Messages: 28
Registered: January 2017
Junior Member
Freenix Ninja
That's odd... Why is the first one #6? Or is it just the second part of #5?

Also, what exactly is the issue with web links in posts? Do they not show up?

[Updated on: Wed, 19 April 2017 23:04]

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Re: standalone FXP web site [message #8 is a reply to message #7] Sun, 23 April 2017 14:39 Go to previous messageGo to next message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
The long post was my first post on the forum, and it went into moderation, which I wasn't expecting. Also, web links are not allowed on one's first post, hence the funny nature of that long winded post. The second post is just me testing the system, to see if I could get a second one through without weblinks. I guess that one went into moderation as well.

Here are the links, sorry for the confusion:

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23653708/fallback-from-fontawesome-if-font-download-blocked
[1] https://github.com/encharm/Font-Awesome-SVG-PNG
[2] https://pixelambacht.nl/2016/font-awesome-fixed/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20180715131204/www.strangetimes.observer/software-libre/2018/01/07/freeslack-notes.html
[4] I've since cleaned up the code, and it should be valid now, although it could use a few alt-texts on the images, it seems.
[5] Now I get 2 errors and 192 warnings.

Embarrassed

[note: broken URLs updated on 2020.02.18]

[Updated on: Tue, 18 February 2020 18:30]

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icon2.gif  New URLs [message #59 is a reply to message #8] Tue, 18 February 2020 18:26 Go to previous messageGo to next message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
There are some new URLs for this project.

Because we have moved away from all things SLACK ("Bob" help us all), I have decided to let the freeslack.space domain name die. However, the standalone download site and repository lives on, just with a few changes to the URLs. Both work with or without SSL, your choice.

https://freenix.3space.xyz/

https://freenix.3space.xyz/mirror/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/

For now, http://freeslack.space redirects to the first link above.

However, http://mirror.freeslack.space/ is still live, for the time being. It will die in flames in about 30 days. You can stay connected to the repository by switching to the second link above.

If you do not fancy subdomains, these also work:

https://3space.xyz/freenix/

https://3space.xyz/freenix/mirror/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/


Oh, and on a side note, while this one still works....

https://beauxbead.com/freeslackmirror/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/

it is only still working because of symbolic links on the server. I suggest moving away from that one if you can, and replacing it on the main site with the second link in this post. Oh, right, it is a wiki... maybe I can do that myself. I think I created an account, possibly....

Anyway, I just wanted to put the new links here and announce the immenent death of the old domain name.

Misison accomplished.
Re: New URLs [message #61 is a reply to message #59] Fri, 17 April 2020 18:30 Go to previous message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
Sigh....

It appears that my ability to keep a stable mirror going for multiple years is lacking. Long story short, my hosting account has become hostile to software distribution mirrors. Their virus scanner has started attacking packages that have been hosted and stable for years. I am getting multiple false virus reports every day now.

They have started using their vague Terms of Service and Acceptable Usage Policy to dodge the fact that their virus scanner has clearly gone haywire. I do not think this is going to end well. "You are sharing these files, and file sharing is not allowed, so therefore the virus scanner is doing its job correctly." I cannot follow that kind of logic, but they have the lawyers and the servers, so I just need to move my business elsewhere.

I guess the time has come to shut this mirror down. Maybe I can re-open an new one somewhere else. If I am able to find an opportunity to work with, I will post here. Otherwise, the following mirror links will be going away in the near future, I am very sad to say:

https://beauxbead.com/freeslackmirror/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/

https://freenix.3space.xyz/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/

https://3space.xyz/freenix/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/


I recommend switching to one of these ASAP if you have not done so already:


https://freenix.net/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/

https://slackware.uk/freeslack/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/

https://mirror.linux.pizza/freenix/freeslack64-14.2/


The virus scanner has not attacked the installer DVD ISO image yet, so I will leave that in place for the time being. It still serves as a webseed for most of the torrents I have created, actually. If/when that file comes under attack, I might have to remove it as well.

In the meantime, I have uploaded the standalone website, all the files needed to re-host the standalone website, and the DVD ISO files, all to the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/@freenix

I hope this is in alignment with our standards and principles. I am not aware of any conflicts. This buys us a lot for free. The standalone site will live on as long as the Archive does:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200417214812/http://freenix.3space.xyz/

You can grab the files needed to rehost the site on any server:

https://archive.org/download/Freenix_standalone_site_files/site_files.tar.gz

The ISO is hosted there too:

https://archive.org/details/freenix64-14.2-install-dvd

Which also gives us a fresh torrent with a fresh (fast, reliable) webseed:

https://archive.org/download/freenix64-14.2-install-dvd/freenix64-14.2-install-dvd_archive.torrent

Maybe when 15.0 comes out, I can re-invest in a decent server. For now though, consider beauxbead/3space/freeslack.space dead. The webfront at https://freenix.3space.xyz/ should stay up for the remainder of 2020 at least. And the ISO file might stick around for a while too. The mirror links for use with slackpkg though, those are now officially dead. Even if you get them to work, the file set is incomplete (quarantined), so expect errors in grabbing specific packages. Right now the list is only about 5 or so, but expect more as their virus scanner continues to mutate.

Thanks, and sorry....

Confused
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