A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle, but the joy of the web is that there are no…
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Because I'm genetically pre-disposed to watch every piece of Star Wars content ever created, I signed up for a free trial of Disney's newest streaming service. As part of onboarding, it asked me to create a profile name. This is typically done so that multi-user households can have separate profiles and preferences. Mum doesn't have her princess stories disrupting Dad's suggestions. And Junior…
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There are loads of really delightful Simplified and Traditional Chinese True Type Fonts available on the web. There's only one issue - the file sizes are really large. In many cases, too large to effectively use as a web-font. For example, this calligraphy style font is 3.4MB. The beautiful Paper Cut Font weighs in at 14MB! That file-size is far to heavy to embed on a web page. …
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So, I stayed up bashing my head against a brick wall all last night! PHP's string functions aren't (yet) UTF-8 aware. This is a replacement for subtr_replace which should work on UTF-8 Strings: function utf8_substr_replace($original, $replacement, $position, $length) { $startString = mb_substr($original, 0, $position, "UTF-8"); $endString = mb_substr($original, $position + $length,…
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