screenshot.rocks fits any image you upload into a web browser-style frame and gives you a new image of the composite. It's perfect for turning photoshopped web design ideas into mockups so people know what they might look like in real life. Or simply as a cute frame for your favorite images, for sharing on the internet. Read the rest

RSS Box generates the "missing" feeds for Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, Instagram users, and various other sites that fail to offer RSS.

This website lets you subscribe to RSS feeds for websites that do not support RSS themselves, by using the respective website's API and then translating that data to RSS feeds.

If you get a page saying "Application error", simply try again. This website resolves shortlink URLs to give the reader a better experience, and embeds linked content directly into the RSS feed. You will get this error if this takes longer than the web server allows.

Some websites, like YouTube, support RSS feeds but they are quite hard to find, so this website will provide the URL.

You can get that pin from Diesel Sweeties. Read the rest

Write-Only is a "typewriter", in that you can type but you cannot delete. You can copy what you've written to the clipboard and go full-screen, and that's it. Read the rest

Send a message about how you're feeling to this website or read messages others have sent. If there are no messages sent within a 24 hour period, "This website will self destruct." It was created by FemmeAndroid and, if you are really feeling down, she's provided a list of mental health resources to help. From the explanation:

Hi,

I’m a website. I’ll be gone soon, and that’s okay.

You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.

That’s okay though.

Until then, let me know how you’re doing. Other people will be able to read what you write, but your name or identity won’t be attached to anything, so feel free to say what’s on your mind.

It’s been a rough month.

With love,

ThisWebsiteWillSelfdestruct (dot) com

PS. I don’t collect any data about you other than the text you send me. I don’t believe in tracking people, so no analytics are kept about users. Consider this my privacy policy and terms of service.

We just crossed 75,000 letters written. People have read letters more than FIVE and a half MILLION times.https://t.co/dRRSq48495

— FemmeAndroid (@FemmeAndroid) April 22, 2020

Knewz has a stark spot-color design (I've decided to call it Drudge Custard, but I like it!) and a completely nauseating name. It's a pure aggregator, too -- just links to other people's sites -- even though it's from the News Corp stable.

“Knewz is unique in that readers can, at a single glance, see multiple sources. It is not egregious aggregation but generous aggregation. There are mastheads from across the political and regional spectrum, and premium publishers will not be relegated in the rankings,” said Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp.

Knewz.com works by combining cutting edge, proprietary artificial intelligence with experienced editors. The technology constantly scans hundreds of real news sources, and editors curate a selection of headlines that provide a broad perspective on stories of the day.

Aggregation is a fundamentally good thing. I hope it does well and helps revive the web as a good place to go to find out what's in the kn... sorry, the news. Read the rest

Joshua Topolsky's new techology news site, Input, just launched. The aim, in a crowded pack? To focus on the things that are neither speculative nor mass-market but which will shape lives in the immediate future.

We see technology as not just an intrinsic part of your life and ours, but a shaper of that life in a way that can be seen but is often missed. We see technology not just as a thing to be covered but a core part of the way we need to tell the story. This isn’t just about phone reviews or detailing the next Twitter meltdown (we’ll do some of that too). It’s about finding the ways technology and a life lived inside technology changes us, connects us, and moves us — and then telling you why you should care with as much honesty as possible. And hopefully, telling you in ways that make you question, think, and act.

Articles include Twitter's plans to label candidates in 2020, Facebook's disinclination to cooperate with California's new privacy laws, and Nike's effort to create sneakers for people with disabilities. But there are reviews, too: the new 16-inch MacBook, the new Moto smartwatch, Boosted Beams. Read the rest

Unshort unshortens short links for you, revealing the true URL. This lets you visit a page without being tracked by the URL shortening service. There are add-ons for all major browsers to automatically unshorten all shortened links; source code is available if you don't even want Unshort knowing where you're headed. Read the rest

Otherti.me presents a new example of Raphael Bastide's digital artwork each day.

Today, I am starting a series of web based artworks: one page a day for 30 days. It is called https://t.co/Z49qqAy9pa and it is starting with the first release: https://t.co/M1JkcFcPHb#othertime #netart pic.twitter.com/HT6oxrwSTd

— Raphaël Bastide (@raphaelbastide) November 16, 2019

Read the rest

Already removed from major browsers, Adobe Flash now suffers the second death of being forgotten. Google will soon deindex Flash from its search results.

Goodbye, Flash, writes Google engineering manager Dong-Hwi Lee.

I still remember my son playing endless number of Flash games until my wife yelled at him. It's time to go to bed, son. Hey Flash, it's your turn to go to bed.

Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Most users and websites won't see any impact from this change.

The EFF's Panopticlick tool (previously) is now a general purpose testing suite for browser privacy, checking Do Not Track, the effectiveness of ad- and tracker-blocking, and providing details on your browser's fingerprint. [via Hacker News] Read the rest

No Maintenance Intended is a snippet of markup (or markdown) you can add to your site or app to ensure that users understand that they're on their own and can stuff right off if they think any work is going to get done for them. Same for would-be contributors and their annoying pull requests.

If you’re here, that likely means a project linked you here.

Thanks so much for being interested in that project!

Open Source is rewarding but it can also be exhausting sometimes.

Bullshit.js is a javascript bookmarklet that replaces all the managerial and marketing jargon and other buzzwords on the page with the word "bullshit." For example, if I were to write that it was a "keyword-driven synergy of empowered innovation and in-context dynamic content" it might replace that with "bullshit bullshit bullshit of bullshit bullshit and bullshit bullshit bullshit". Read the rest

If you're looking to refresh your social media avatars for Halloween, use this generator by Olivia Haines to create ghosts, vampires, witches and more.  I went with bloody mummy:

(Via Kalonica.) Read the rest

Yarn does one thing very well: return a brief video clip of a movie based on the dialog you type in.

I especially like that if you paste in a URL, you get an automatic subtitled GIF that links to the video instead of the full embed. A real USDA grade A GIF image, not a bottom-quality mpeg hacked into its mime type or some other shenanigan that makes it effectively impossible to repost.

I wrote earlier this year about Lorem Picsum, a site that provides random placeholder images for use in design projects in the spirit of Lorem Ipsum, the classic jumbled-up latin passage used likewise for text. It's taken off. Creator David Marby explains what it's like to serve a billion images a month of a budget.

Processing images is very CPU intensive. As Lorem Picsum runs on a very small budget, to cope with all the requests as the service became more popular, we wanted to avoid doing so as much as possible. This meant adding caching to multiple layers of the architecture. We added two separate layers of caching: A CDN in front, as well as a second cache layer using Varnish Cache. To make the image processing as efficient as possible, we decided to use libvips, as it's very fast and resource-efficient.

As part of making Lorem Picsum as easy to use as possible, we've never required any registration, API keys, or enforced any usage limits. This has generally worked out well, but once in a while a high traffic site deploys production code calling our API, usually accidentally, which leads to [problems]

PNG, the classiest just-works web image format, offers unique opportunities for glitch art—all flowing from the fine details of its specification.

PNG is a very simple format compared to JPEG or other new image formats. The filter algorithms are like toys, and its compression method is the same as oldschool Zip compression. However, this simple image format shows a surprisingly wide range of glitch variations. We would perhaps only need one example to explain a JPEG glitch, but we need many different types of samples in order to explain what a PNG glitch is. PNG was developed as an alternative format of GIF. However, when it comes to glitching, GIF is a format that is too poor to be compared with PNG. PNG has prepared surprisingly rich results that have been concealed by the checksum barrier for a long time.

Mandatory:

Read the rest

r/megalophobia is a my new favorite subreddit, specializing in things that are very big and therefore very, very scary. Postings range from Lovecraftian monsters looming in the mist to zoom-out animations impressing upon the viewer the insignificance of Planet Earth and all human concerns. Currently popular are disturbing photoshops of large comets looming over the major cities they are about to destroy.

Above is "War Machines," by Simon Stålenhag (previously). Read the rest