Design Principles

Foxhound is “a web browser with dynamic data-flow tracking enabled in the JavaScript engine and DOM, based on Mozilla Firefox.” It can be used to identify insecure data flows or data privacy leaks in client-side web applications.” We can use it to check our sites.

For all sites (except this one, which is just my notes), we should observe the following:

  • We don’t use external services like Cloudflare (why not?).
  • The sites should load all text and image content even when scripts are blocked.
  • The sites should not leak any data to external services.
  • The compulsory cookie notices should be small and unobtrusive because we will have traffic from traffic swap and PTC sites to a certain extent, and the cookie warnings should not obscure anything.
  • All images should be compressed as much as possible, e.g., to 50 as JPG, and the size reduced to around 1280 px max width/height (whichever is longest). “Optimization” plug-ins are extremely wasteful of resources and rarely make images as good as can be done manually.
  • The purpose of all our systems is to make things simple and easy for the users to do stuff. Difficulty and complexity, when they are unavoidable any other way, are always put on to the system side, not the user side.
  • We don’t use Node.js, React, or other heavy frameworks (why not?).

Simplicity

Our technology choices follow directly from our users’ reality. See Technology Choices for a full explanation of why we use plain HTML, CSS, PHP, and vanilla JS rather than modern frameworks.

The Great Tech Lie

SEO

We write about what we are doing in the most efficient and accurate way possible. We do not adapt what we write to suit other entities. The search engines may or may not send us users, and we understand that it is not under our control at all. See “marketing“. In any case, search engines are primarily designed to look at the content of a site so as to decide which searches it’s relevant to. If we write our content properly, there should be no need for tricks and SEO nonsense.

We will rely on our own outreach via our members and other visitors.

See also Future prospects of the web hosting business in light of Google crushing smaller sites.

Big Tech likes to embed itself in as many websites as possible. Services like gstatic.com, Cloudflare, and a host of others tempt us by making it “easier” to make our sites. But there is a huge downside: when things go wrong or when the provider decides it doesn’t like us, those features will simply disappear from our sites.

So we will not use them.