D'yer remember the eighties? The eighties, eh? Remember 'em? With the Acorn Archimedes an' that? What were we like? Remember them mags what y'got? The computer mags? Wirral the source code? Remember typin' it all in be hand? If yer semicolon were outta place y'd gerra syntax error! And you try telling that to the young people of today, will they believe yer?

For those of you born this century, it might be hard to believe but - yes - the way we distributed source code back in the day was on paper. Computer magazines would be full of news, reviews, letters (like the comments section of a website), classified ads (like eBay), and code listings - like this:

YORE COMPU​TER 🕹

@yorecomputer

1986:

Your Sinclair Magazine Issue 09, page 50

archive.org/stream/your-si… pic.x.com/b3jgdn12kk

---

That's how I learned to code. Laboriously type in a few hundred lines of dense code, check it furiously for mistakes, get frustrated at a syntax error on line 115, scream "eureka!" when I got it running, and then investigated its inner workings.

A few months ago, Internet funster Matt Round announced that he was bringing back type-in mags. But, this time, for the web!

Would that work? In an era of vibe-coding, templates, and batteries-included frameworks, who on Earth would buy a magazine like this?

Well - you, I hope. Because it is now on sale and features a project written by me!

For a very reasonable £7.99, you get ten different games, projects, and demos to type in. That's a mere 79p per website! Cheaper than a C64 cassette I reckon.

The artwork by HappyToast is lush, the layout is gorgeous, and the programs are fun. Some of them you'll understand straight away, others you won't quite get until the very last character.

Could you cheat by scanning it, running OCR over the code, and then running it? Sure. But you can also hire someone to kiss your partner if you can't be bothered to put the effort in. Where's the fun in that?

Here's a sneak preview of mine:

I'd love your feedback on my project and I'd be delighted if you turned it into something awesome.

Copy-typing code - especially Max Goodhart's incredible "Quine" project - is a meditative and unusual experience. I propped up the magazine on my laptop and was delighted that I only made five typos the first time through.

Is this really how we lived? Yes! Is this something we should go back to? Well, that's a harder question to answer.

I hope you enjoy playing with what I and others have created. I bet you'll learn something new. Please remix mine and show it to your friends. If you haven't got a friend, one of the projects is a primitive Markov chain - so you can build your own digital pal.

You can buy DOCTYPE magazine now. It will make the perfect Christmas gift for all the nerds in your life.

There are several services which claim to be able to detect just how lean, green, and clean your website is. But, in my opinion, they're all a bit inadequate.

WebsiteCarbon

The WebsiteCarbon.com service gives me this very pleasing report

But what does that actually mean? There's an almost content-free description of their rating system. It boils down to how large your web pages are and whether your data centre runs on green energy.

I specifically chose Krystal as my host because of their green energy credentials. So it got that right.

WebsiteCarbon seems to just be an advertising pitch for their paid-for auditing services:

You can get a comprehensive view of a website’s emissions and potential improvements by carrying out a Website Carbon Audit.

Let's try another service.

EcoGrader

EcoGrader gives me a lower score but provides a lot more detail about why.

They also give tips on how I can improve things.

Do you notice anything about those tips? They're basically the same as Core Web Vitals! A set of useful, if generic, tips to optimise your website.

Others

There are several other services which claim to measure your site's eco-credentials. But, as far as I can tell, they're all doing the same thing; reskinning Core Web Vitals or similar products.

Some, like, Blacklight are promoted on the claim that excessive tracking scripts are an environmental disaster. In the end, the message is the same - clean up your website to make it faster more efficient.

What Does This Mean?

The energy efficiency of modern codecs is often asymmetric. It might be energy intensive to encode a movie - but that's paid back a thousand-fold by having to store and stream less data and by the efficiency of the decode process at the user's end.

If you operating at planetary scale then, yes, a small saving affecting a billion users will have a huge impact. If you're optimising a single hero image on your recipe blog, probably not so much.

Much like the discredited idea that by switching off your "standby" devices you can save £££, most of these website changes are marginal at best.

Yes, we should strive for svelte and performant websites - as much for usability as for environmentalism. It makes ecological sense to choose a hosting provider who is at least somewhat responsible in their energy usage - as much for cost as for anything else.

If these websites help convince your boss that you can remove horrific amounts of JS, upgrade images to WebP, and set sensible caching policies - great! Sell them the shiny accreditation badge while you go about making the site better.

Finally, a word of caution to anyone implicitly trusting these services - there's no way to know what's going on in the background of a website. An ultra efficient looking website served from a green data-centre, might be spinning up a dozen LLMs just to churn out the page content. A slow website might be solar powered. All those ultra-compressed images might be adverts for fossil fuels.

And every time you leave a comment on my blog, I shoot a panda.

In it, they make the convincing case that phones are perfectly capable of hosting websites and - if we want more people to escape the walled-gardens - this could be a good way to get people back into self-hosting.

I loved hosting a small site on my Nokia N95 back in the day, and I'd be overjoyed if modern phones allowed this. But there are a few pitfalls.

Connectivity is the main one. If you're sat at home on WiFi all day, or only ever in an area with good cellular reception, then this is great. But the second you get on an underground train or climb a mountain your website goes offline. Perhaps it might be nice to introduce a little randomness into our sites' availability. But most people want their site to work even if their phone is in a deadspot.

Cost is also a factor. If you're on an unlimited data plan, then you're fine. If you're on a cheap PAYG plan with only a few GB then your website becomes a liability. If one of your links becomes suddenly popular, you might burn through your monthly limit in a few minutes.

Battery life is the next big problem. Again, if you're sat in an office all day with your phone plugged in, you're fine. But if you're out and about, running a server and delivering data is power-hungry. Do you want your phone to die because your cat photo went viral?

Security also becomes a factor. Web servers are constantly under attack. Will your private data be compromised if your phone's webserver hasn't received the latest patch? And if an attacker gets onto your phone, can they then infect the rest of your home network?

All that being said... I still like the idea! I have a few old Android devices which I use as IP Cameras. They stream pictures and videos across my local network - and I can control them over a web browser when I'm at home. But would I want to expose them to the whole Internet? No!

With the price of SBCs coming down, I think it makes more sense to have a "website in a box" device. A little Raspberry Pi which is only running enough of a server to power WordPress or similar. Hardened against attack, and easy to manage and edit from a cheap mobile phone. Perhaps give it battery backup and a SIM card if you want redundancy. Boom! Instant personal webserver.

Yes, our phones should be under our control - and I certainly support anyone who wants to run a server from their device - but it seems to me that there are several hurdles which make it impractical.

I don't own the trademark, nor have any special rights to that name. So I wanted to document how I recovered it on a few prominent sites.

NPM

The ~edent account had no activity on it. I emailed support to see if I could claim it as an inactive account. They said:

We'd suggest that you follow through our name dispute process. In short, email the current scope owner of the package and cc support@npmjs.com to request the name.

I emailed the owner. NPM also sent some follow-up emails to them. After a month, they transferred the name to me.

While it was easy for me, I do feel slightly guilty. Yes, the account seemed abandoned - but one month isn't a long time if you're on holiday, in hospital, or otherwise incommunicado.

Telegram

I was quite late to popular chat app Telegram. By the time I got there, edent was already taken. I sent the owner a few messages to see if they'd relinquish it - but they didn't reply.

Telegram's dispute resolution programme is a bit simple:

If your desired username is already taken, we will be happy to help you acquire it for your account or channel, provided that you have that same username on at least two of these services: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

I already had Facebook and Twitter - and I proved that to Telegram - so they released the name. Again, I feel slightly bad about taking a username from someone. It's a policy that many people have complained about

SoundCloud

Another completely dormant account. They'd posted no content. I dropped an email to support, and showed that I was edent on other services. Their reply was pretty brutal:

In line with our Inactive URL policy I have reached out to the current owner of and given them 48 hours notice to become active on the account. If no activity takes place within this period then we will be happy to transfer the URL.

48 hours seems like a really short window. I suspect they could see that no one had logged into the account for many years. To assuage my guilt, I waited for a week before prompting SoundCloud to transfer the account.

YouTube

When I first became aware of YouTube usernames, they used Google+. For some reason, Google didn't like the name edent. Google's name policies are deeply weird. I'd amassed a thousand or so YouTube subscribers, which unlocked the "creator" channel. So after a few frustrating emails, I was able to get youtube.com/edent

Ko-Fi

Ko-Fi is sort of like Patreon - people can send you money for the work you create. In order to get a short name, you have to be a premium user. I had a chat with the people who run the site and - because I'm such a social-media-superstar(!) they gave me a gold account for free.

If you'd like a discounted gold account, you can use my referral link https://ko-fi.com/gold?a=Q5Q4JHML

Where it didn't work

There are a few sites and services where I've not grabbed the name I wanted.

LinkedIn

I connected to the chap who currently uses /in/edent and asked politely if I could use the name. I told him that I had no rights to force him to give it up, and it was just a friendly request.

He uses it quite actively, and quite reasonably didn't want to change it. I can't complain about that!

LinkedIn don't have a username dispute process that I could find. If a user releases their username, you can't claim it straight away

If a member uses a URL and then changes it, that URL will be unavailable for use by yourself and other members for six months.

I'm sure if you're a big brand or celebrity, you can contact LinkedIn and grab the name you want. But I can live with being /in/TerenceEden

Instagram

Insta doesn't let you swap names, as far as I can find. But it will let you claim a name if someone is impersonating you.

Please attach a clear photo of yourself holding an accepted form of ID. Make sure that both your face and the photo in the ID are clearly visible.

The person using edent has 0 posts, but still received ~900 followers. They weren't following anyone. I am only slightly more active than them, so I tried my luck with the dispute process.

I tried sending off my passport photo - but the page kept giving an HTTP400 error.

I used a smaller photo, fewer words in the complaint box, being logged in and out, different browsers. Nothing.

And then, out of the blue, I got this response:

We can’t give you access to this account or continue with your request because we haven’t received an acceptable ID that matches the information listed on the account.

As the user isn't pretending to be me or using my real name, I'm stuck being _edent_. Ah well.

Flickr

I don't understand Flickr, and suspect I never will. I am flickr.com/edent - but my "screen name" is terenceeden. When I try to change that to "edent" I get told I can't. I've looked around in Flickr's support forums, and no one seems to know what this vestigial "screen name" is for, so I'm going to ignore it. I have the vanity URl and that's all I care about.

Vivino

On the wine rating app, I am _edent_. The guy using edent has more followers than me and is much more active than me. His real name also shortens nicely to "edent".

Oh well, I should have been quicker off the mark!

Tumblr

I recently received an email from tumblr asking if I was still using one of my old names. They said if they didn't receive a reply, they'd release the name for general use.

That's their stated policy - so I all I can do is watch and wait.

edent.com

In a fit of unbridled optimism, I thought I'd try and buy the domain edent.com

HAHAHAHAHA! Nope! No. I cannot afford $19,000. I tried bargaining them down. The domain has remained unsold for years - there are no "e-dentists" who want it at that price.

Every few months, the registry gets in contact with me again.

Even at $10k I'd struggle to justify this. I'm not an international brand, I'm just this guy you know...

I'm quite content with edent.tel.

Some final thoughts

Usernames are hard. Perhaps, in an ideal world, we'd all use Indie Auth and use our domain names as our usernames. I'd be twitter.com/shkspr.mobi, for example.

But it is useful to have separate identities on different systems, and the cost of a domain name is still too high for most people in the world.

Naming disputes are a tricky customer service problem. Giving a few months for an owner of an abandoned account to respond seems reasonable to me.

Or, perhaps I should stop being so precious about building a "personal brand"?

Nah!

• My Internet fried Katie has written a similar guide to different services.
• Further discussion on HN.