#Windows web hosting services
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Windows Web Hosting Services
Windows Web Hosting Services offer a web hosting service that runs on a Windows-based server. Consumers usually pick a Windows-based hosting service if they program their websites using development code like .NET. If you’re looking for online services similar to Windows Hosting, consider our Linux Hosting or Cheap Web Hosting categories.
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Best Web Hosting Services of 2023: Bullten
Your website's success depends on picking the Best Web Hosting Provider. Finding the hosting company that best meets your needs might be difficult given the plethora of options currently accessible. One of the leading web hosting companies in 2023 will be examined in more detail in this blog post: Bullten. We'll look at what distinguishes Bullten in the crowded hosting market and why it can be the best option for your website.
About Bullten
Bullten is a web hosting business that has gained notoriety when it first entered the market. Bullten has established a reputation for being a top option for both organizations and individuals by placing a significant emphasis on offering dependable, secure, and high-performance hosting services.
Key Features of Bullten Hosting
Performance: Bullten offers high-performance hosting with SSD storage and powerful servers. This ensures that your website loads quickly and can handle traffic spikes without a hitch, contributing to a better user experience.
Security: Security is a top priority for Bullten. They provide robust security features, including DDoS protection, firewalls, malware scanning, and regular backups, to keep your website safe from online threats.
99.9% Uptime Guarantee: Bullten is committed to keeping your website online and accessible. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means your site will be available to visitors nearly all the time.
Excellent Customer Support: Bullten prides itself on offering exceptional customer support. Their knowledgeable and responsive support team is available 24/7 to assist you with any issues or questions you may have.
Scalability: Whether you're running a small personal blog or a large e-commerce store, Bullten offers scalable hosting solutions to meet your needs. You can easily upgrade your hosting plan as your website grows.
Choice of Hosting Plans: Bullten provides a variety of hosting plans, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and more. This versatility allows you to choose the hosting solution that best fits your requirements and budget.
Free SSL Certificates: SSL certificates are crucial for securing data transmission between your website and visitors. Bullten includes free SSL certificates with their hosting plans, enhancing the trustworthiness of your site.
Easy-to-Use Control Panel: Bullten offers a user-friendly control panel that makes it simple to manage your hosting account, install applications, and monitor your website's performance.
Why Choose Bullten in 2023?
In a crowded market of web hosting providers, Bullten stands out for several reasons:
Reliability: Bullten's commitment to uptime and server performance ensures that your website remains accessible to your audience, minimizing downtime and potential revenue loss.
Security: With the increasing number of cyber threats, having robust security measures in place is essential. Bullten's comprehensive security features give you peace of mind.
Customer Support: Exceptional customer support can make all the difference when you encounter technical issues or need assistance. Bullten's 24/7 support team is there to help you whenever you need it.
Scalability: As your website grows, you can seamlessly upgrade your hosting plan with Bullten, eliminating the need for migration headaches.
Conclusion
The success of your website or online business depends on your choice of web hosting provider. Bullten is demonstrating that it is a leading player in the web hosting sector in 2023 as a result of its performance, security, dependability, and superior customer service. Bullten is unquestionably a company to take into consideration for your hosting requirements if you're seeking for a supplier who checks all the right boxes. Make a wise choice and provide your website with the hosting it requires.
#best dedicated server hosting services#vps hosting canada#cheap dedicated server hosting#fastest shared hosting in US#fully managed web hosting#fully managed hosting services#fully managed dedicated server hosting#windows server hosting#vps servers canada provider#secure web hosting#best server hosting#managed web servers service
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How lock-in hurts design
Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!
If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.
Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.
This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.
Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:
https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/
But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.
Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.
Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/
This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!
But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.
That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah
More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.
An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.
Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.
Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":
https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html
Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/
But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.
The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):
https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/
Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model
Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."
Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.
Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.
I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited
Image:
Belem (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#desire paths#design#drm#everything not mandatory is prohibited#apps#ip#innovation#user innovation#technological self-determination#john deere#twitter#felony contempt of business model
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Are planning to order a Dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server (VPS)? If so, you will need to know the difference between Managed and Unmanaged servers. The difference may seem obvious-one is managed by our web hosting provider in USA and other is not. However, there are other key difference that should be aware of when making this decision.
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Why Should You Opt For Shared Hosting Services For Your New Website?
Website hosting companies can help you with your WordPress hosting services. Read the article to know about its benefits in your niche business.
Despite the variety of hosting choices, affordable web hosting services, especially entry-level hosting, is the preferred choice for the majority of websites. This setup lowers hosting expenses while also requiring less technical knowledge from the users. Entry-level shared hosting plans might be the ideal, cost-effective solution if you're beginning a new website, a tiny blog with little traffic, or both.
What do you understand by WordPress website hosting?
WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting created expressly to support WordPress websites. By using a WordPress server, you may access a tonne of resources and services created specifically for WordPress sites. If you used WordPress to develop your website, employing WordPress hosting will benefit you much. WP hosting and WordPress websites work well together, which improves your site's functionality, security, and accessibility to automatic upgrades. To get the greatest results, combine WordPress Hosting with your WordPress website if you already have one.
Important shared WordPress hosting features of web hosting services
When looking for the best web host template, there are several important technical aspects of web hosting services that you need to be aware of. You must sift through the high claims of the limitless capability to arrive at the proper specifications that would be more than adequate to meet your hosting needs.
A shared hosting plan's popularity among novices is mostly due to its price. Aside from that, installing WordPress takes only a few minutes thanks to the included one-click installer. Especially if your website is expanding, you probably don't want to remain on a shared hosting plan indefinitely. However, it's a fantastic starting point and will provide you with everything you need to build and develop your WordPress site.
Your host's performance is crucially vital. Your site will suffer without a reliable host behind it, both in terms of user experience and search engine rankings. You will notice enhanced performance if you host your website on a managed WordPress server or dedicated server.
Shared hosting's benefits and drawbacks
The most obvious advantage of shared hosting is cost reduction. Dedicated server hosting companies offer basic plans starting at around $3 per month. Another advantage is that you don't have to worry too much about server-side upkeep. Without delving into specifics, another advantage is the flexibility to scale up when necessary. At the top end, many hosts also offer specialized packages.
Final Words
Are you trying to find reliable Windows shared hosting service? Then you should consider going to Host Planet. They offer affordable Shared WordPress Hosting services for your blog. Contact them immediately.
#affordable Shared WordPress Hosting services#dedicated server hosting companies#windows shared hosting#wordpress website hosting#affordable web hosting services#website hosting companies#web hosting services#web host template
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"how do I keep my art from being scraped for AI from now on?"
if you post images online, there's no 100% guaranteed way to prevent this, and you can probably assume that there's no need to remove/edit existing content. you might contest this as a matter of data privacy and workers' rights, but you might also be looking for smaller, more immediate actions to take.
...so I made this list! I can't vouch for the effectiveness of all of these, but I wanted to compile as many options as possible so you can decide what's best for you.
Discouraging data scraping and "opting out"
robots.txt - This is a file placed in a website's home directory to "ask" web crawlers not to access certain parts of a site. If you have your own website, you can edit this yourself, or you can check which crawlers a site disallows by adding /robots.txt at the end of the URL. This article has instructions for blocking some bots that scrape data for AI.
HTML metadata - DeviantArt (i know) has proposed the "noai" and "noimageai" meta tags for opting images out of machine learning datasets, while Mojeek proposed "noml". To use all three, you'd put the following in your webpages' headers:
<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai, noml">
Have I Been Trained? - A tool by Spawning to search for images in the LAION-5B and LAION-400M datasets and opt your images and web domain out of future model training. Spawning claims that Stability AI and Hugging Face have agreed to respect these opt-outs. Try searching for usernames!
Kudurru - A tool by Spawning (currently a Wordpress plugin) in closed beta that purportedly blocks/redirects AI scrapers from your website. I don't know much about how this one works.
ai.txt - Similar to robots.txt. A new type of permissions file for AI training proposed by Spawning.
ArtShield Watermarker - Web-based tool to add Stable Diffusion's "invisible watermark" to images, which may cause an image to be recognized as AI-generated and excluded from data scraping and/or model training. Source available on GitHub. Doesn't seem to have updated/posted on social media since last year.
Image processing... things
these are popular now, but there seems to be some confusion regarding the goal of these tools; these aren't meant to "kill" AI art, and they won't affect existing models. they won't magically guarantee full protection, so you probably shouldn't loudly announce that you're using them to try to bait AI users into responding
Glaze - UChicago's tool to add "adversarial noise" to art to disrupt style mimicry. Devs recommend glazing pictures last. Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)
WebGlaze - Free browser-based Glaze service for those who can't run Glaze locally. Request an invite by following their instructions.
Mist - Another adversarial noise tool, by Psyker Group. Runs on Windows and Linux (Nvidia GPU required) or on web with a Google Colab Notebook.
Nightshade - UChicago's tool to distort AI's recognition of features and "poison" datasets, with the goal of making it inconvenient to use images scraped without consent. The guide recommends that you do not disclose whether your art is nightshaded. Nightshade chooses a tag that's relevant to your image. You should use this word in the image's caption/alt text when you post the image online. This means the alt text will accurately describe what's in the image-- there is no reason to ever write false/mismatched alt text!!! Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)
Sanative AI - Web-based "anti-AI watermark"-- maybe comparable to Glaze and Mist. I can't find much about this one except that they won a "Responsible AI Challenge" hosted by Mozilla last year.
Just Add A Regular Watermark - It doesn't take a lot of processing power to add a watermark, so why not? Try adding complexities like warping, changes in color/opacity, and blurring to make it more annoying for an AI (or human) to remove. You could even try testing your watermark against an AI watermark remover. (the privacy policy claims that they don't keep or otherwise use your images, but use your own judgment)
given that energy consumption was the focus of some AI art criticism, I'm not sure if the benefits of these GPU-intensive tools outweigh the cost, and I'd like to know more about that. in any case, I thought that people writing alt text/image descriptions more often would've been a neat side effect of Nightshade being used, so I hope to see more of that in the future, at least!
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Selling your merch and shipping from home with Fourthwall
I've been selling @shiftythrifting Junk Boxes - our curated secondhand mystery boxes - since 2017 using different platforms with different levels of success. I moved to Fourthwall in 2022 and my teeny tiny business has only grown since then! FW is free to use and you get ALL the money from your home sales save for the credit card processing fees. I don't miss the fee structure from our previous hosts, so I thought I'd write up a little guide on how easy it is to get started.
Things you need to start shipping from home:
A scale, and it doesn't need to be an expensive or large one! Even a kitchen scale works for small stuff.
Packaging and packing materials for the product(s) you're selling.
Access to a post office and/or a printer.
Funds set aside for postage. You'll get this money back with your Fourthwall payout when the month rolls over.
(Optional but handy) A ShipStation account.
Make yourself a store if you haven't already. You can sell print on demand, digital stuff, and your own inventory in one place but today we're talking about selling from home, so add a product and pick the middle option.
You can customize everything about your product on this page, from adding size and color variations, the materials used to make it, size charts, inventory, and more. Get an accurate weight of what you're selling in its packaging and add that here. Hit save and you have your first listing. Gonna be selling a variety of products? You can duplicate the listing with the meatball menu! Change the name, photos, and anything else that needs changing and have your second listing up in a couple minutes.
Didi protip: I like to put people's reviews right in the listing. Lots of photos help sell your product, but there's nothing like a positive review from fans!
Fourthwall's Collections feature lets me put my Junk Boxes in their own little section where I can set them to hidden or mark them sold out if I get sick or am on vacation. This lets me easily turn the self-fulfilled part of my store off while folks can still purchase print on demand and digital stuff and sign up for memberships.
Didi protip: If you are in the US, the US postal service will pick up your outgoing packages free of charge on any regular mail day. Just set up a pickup on USPS.com!
When you've made your first sale, you can either make the label yourself or connect directly to ShipStation through Fourthwall's app integration. That's brand new and I love it so far. My labels pop up in ShipStation about 24 hours after a purchase, giving people a little window of time to adjust their order or make changes before I ship it.
At that point, all that's left is handing it off to the postal carrier of your choice! Boom, you're done!
A final note from me, I moved ShopShifty to Fourthwall so I could have one address for ALL my merch instead of splitting it between Patreon, a print-on-demand store, and the Junk Box store. It's proven to be the best choice I've made in years and has saved me a ton of money in marketplace fees, Paypal's cut, and web hosting charges. This has genuinely been the easiest way to sell my merch!
#fourthwall#I wouldn't praise anything like this that I didn't absolutely love#and I love fw#I'm proud our lil shifty made partner#now I help other people set their stores up
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YOU MUST MAKE A WEBSITE
Oh wow, look at that! YET ANOTHER post urging you to make a webbed site! What a completely new thing that people haven't made a thousand masterposts for already!!
• Making a website might look scary. It is Not.
At first, I too thought making a website was too much work. It really isn't! It turns out that all you need is
an HTML file,
a web hosting service and
w3schools tutorials,
and that's about it!
This post will point you towards these resources, and others I found useful while figuring out how to make a website.
• VERY QUICK EXPLANATIONS:
What's HTML and CSS?
HTML is the content of your webpage, the skeleton of it. What shows up in a webpage is what's written in the HTML file!
CSS is the way the HTML is styled; the colour of the background and the letters, the size of elements, the font, all that!
Do I absolutely NEED JavaScript for a website?
Not at all! You don't need to worry about learning it before getting started.
• What do I make a website for? What do I put in there?
ANYTHING AND ALMOST EVERYTHING. Here's some ideas for pages from a post of mine were I was very normal about websites:
You can make a page that's only pictures of your pets.
You can make an interactive adventure.
You can make your own academic blog full of your own essays or articles.
You can just post a ton of art or make a full music page.
You can make a blog and infodump eternally, give book reccs and reviews. You can host a thousand virtual pets and nothing else.
Upload entire books in a single html file. Make a wikipedia for your ocs. Make a fake site for a random fictional place (restaurant, hotel, whatever). You can make a thousand fanpages/shrines about your favorite media. You can upload your own webcomic and make it all like a fancy website and shit.
I could keep going but, for the sake of "brevity", I won't.
• WEBSITE EXAMPLES!
If I started listing the websites I know, this post would be bottomless. Here's only seven:
https://publictransit.neocities.org/ - A webbed site, for sure
https://ribo.zone/ - A personal site
https://leusyth.neocities.org/ - An art archive
https://solaria.neocities.org/ - Personal website with A Lot of stuff (it'll come up in a bit, because it offers web making resources)
https://hog.neocities.org/ - The Hogsite
https://thegardenofmadeline.neocities.org/ - Another personal site! It also has a web resources page and has made another masterpost like this one (but better)
https://spiders.neocities.org/ - My own website, which must be weird to see in mobile . sorry
• You've convinced me. I want a webbed site. Where do I start?
https://neocities.org/
FIRST OF ALL: Neocities. It is a free web hosting service, and it's the one I and the sites I linked use!
When I first started, my website was a black page with red letters and a drawing, and nothing else! It was like that for a month, till i started picking up on how to do things.
Here's what helped me get an idea of how to make things work:
https://sadgrl.online/learn/articles/beginners-guide-neocities
An absolute beginners guide to neocities -- while when you make an account there you get a tutorial page from the site, this one's extra support for that.
https://www.w3schools.com/
Learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript and MANY other coding things for free. All the tutorial/reference pages have live testing windows for you to mess with!! helped me a LOT while figuring this stuff out!
https://htmlcheatsheet.com/
https://htmlcheatsheet.com/css/
Cheatsheets for HTML and CSS, respectively. It includes a JavaScript one too!
https://sadgrl.online/webmastery/
Sadgrl's webmastery resources! Also includes the next resource listed here:
https://sadgrl.online/projects/layout-builder/
Sadgrl's layout builder; not a lot of customization at a first glance, but I've seen wildly different websites all using it as a base, plus it works using CSS Flexbox, so it generates a responsive layout!
(basically, a responsive layout is one that translates well in different sized screens)
https://www.tumblr.com/fysa/728086939730919424/wikitable-code?source=share
Tumblr user fysa made this layout imitating a wiki page!
https://brackets.io/
At some point, you might want to do things outside the Neocities code editor and get one outside the site. I recommend Brackets, because my old as fuck computer can run that and absolutely nothing else apparently, and it works wonderfully! Though I recommend either turning off the code autocomplete or using it after a good while of already using the Neocities code editor, so you get used to coding on your own.
http://www.unit-conversion.info/texttools/text-to-html/
Turn your text into HTML code! i use this kind of pages for my lengthy blog entries that I don't feel like formatting myself.
https://imagecompressor.com/
COMPRESS YOUR IMAGES.
The heavier an image is, the more your site weighs and the more time your page will spend loading. You don't want that, specially if your site is heavy on graphics. This might help!
https://solaria.neocities.org/guides
Some CSS, JavaScript and Accessibility guides! Worth checking out!
https://eloquentjavascript.net/
This is a free, interactive book for learning JavaScript! NOTE: It is very intuitive, but JavaScript is HARD!! I still haven't learned much of it, and my website does fine without so don't worry if you end up not doing much with it. It's still useful + the exercises are fun.
And now, accessories!
• Silly stuff for your page :]
https://gifypet.neocities.org/
Make a virtual pet, copy the code and paste it in your HTML file! You'll get a little guy in your webbed site :]
https://www.wikplayer.com/
Music player for your website!
http://www.mf2fm.com/rv/
JavaScript silly effects for your site :]
https://blinkies.neocities.org/geoblinkies
Blinkie search engine!
https://www.cbox.ws/
Add a chatbox to your site!!
https://momg.neocities.org/
Infinite gallery of gifs. i've spent hours in there looking at moving pictures and out of them all, the ONLY gif i actually ended up using on my site was a rotating tomato slice. it is still there. trapped.
https://wrender.neocities.org/tarotinstructions
A widget that gives you a random tarot card!
https://www.websudoku.com/widget.php
Sudoku widget!
That's about it for now! I don't know how to end this!!! Remember to have fun and google everything you don't know :]
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On creating a wiki for your worldbuilding
Do you have a lot of lore to keep track of? Whether you're an author, a Game Master, or simply someone who really really likes worldbuilding, this post is for you.
Here's a quick overview of what I'll be talking about:
Platforms people use to create personal wikis
Formats and organization systems you may find useful when creating your own wiki
A brief look at the actual content you might put in your wiki (I'm planning a more in-depth post on that later with more images and demos)
And because this is gonna be a long'un, I'm putting a read-more here! I'll also make downloadable epub and PDF versions of this post available for free on my Ko-Fi at some point in the future.
(I'm also planning to reblog with a list of links later on, but I want this initial post shows up in search)
Also now that you're here, I'm going to say this isn't, like, super comprehensive or anything. I'm just talking about stuff I know a little about or have experience with. Please feel free to reblog with additions and/or corrections as needed!
What is a wiki?
According to Wikipedia, "a wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser."
In this case, you'll likely be the sole person making updates to your wiki. The web browser part is optional these days as well, as you'll soon see.
Platforms for creating wikis
Websites for creating worldbuilding wikis
WorldAnvil
This one is actually designed for people who want to create big worldbuilding wikis.
Pros: Worldbuilding prompts! Those are great. It's got a pretty comprehensive set of article types too.
Cons: Kind of expensive to upgrade for features like making your wiki private, and it does NOT work well with adblock turned on, so if you don't want to pay for a membership you'll get inundated with ads. I'm not a huge fan of the interface in general and a lot of it isn't intuitive, but I like what they're doing so I support them anyway.
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Tiddlywiki/Tiddlyhost.com.
In addition to having a cat as its icon and also a silly name, each 'article' you create with this is called a 'tiddler' which makes me think of Chuck Tingle. I haven't used it much myself yet, but I did make an account and it seems pretty neat.
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Miraheze
A community-hosted wiki platform that runs on MediaWiki (which is what Wikipedia runs off of).
Pros: It's not Fandom.com.
Cons: You have to request a wiki and can't just make it yourself, as far as I can tell. I haven't actually looked into this one as much.
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Neocities
An option for if you want to go super oldschool and create a website using only basic html and hyperlinks (without the handy shortcuts of bbcode or Markdown). Monthly cost is $5 usd if you want to have more space and your own domain.
Pros: 100% control over your content.
Cons: Doesn't support PHP databases for wiki software, and can be fairly labour-intensive to update if you break a link or something.
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Fandom.com
Unfortunately, this one is the top result you'll get when you look up how to make your own wiki. I'm only including it here to tell you to stay as far away from it as possible!!
Its staff are known to ban wiki creators from their own wikis and a bunch of other nonsense that I'm not getting into here.
Programs and apps/web apps for creating worldbuilding wikis
Obsidian.md
My personal favourite. I'm planning to make a whole post about how I use it in the near future as part of this article series.
It's a markdown-based application that you can get on just about any platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, etc) which is great. Obsidian is really easy to pick up and use and also has great themes and community plugins!
Best thing is, it's FREE and you only have to pay if you use their publishing service, which... I don't, so.
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Notion
I've heard this one is pretty good too. Idk if it costs anything. It's another "second brain" style app (might be markdown also?) and I think it might do more than Obsidian, but I haven't checked it out much myself.
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Microsoft Word/Google Docs etc.
...Or just about any word processor that lets you create internal hyperlinks. Word may work best due to the collapsible headings so it doesn't get too unwieldy, but *shrug* whatever floats your boat.
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Excel/Google Sheets etc.
Or, again, any spreadsheet creator that lets you create internal hyperlinks.
I'd recommend having some basic spreadsheet knowledge before doing this. It could get complicated. Before I started using Obsidian, I was using Sheets to keep track of my glossary, notes about characters, and plot ideas.
Types of formatting & organization systems
There are as many organization systems as there are people who want to organize their stuff. Everybody needs something a little different! I find the ones that work best for me are systems that have a lot of customization options.
Here are a couple I know of.
Johnny Decimal
This system is absurdly simple in its concept and yet so versatile. From their website (it's just johnnydecimal dot com but I'll link it in a reblog later):
Take everything you need to organise and sort it in to, at most, ten large buckets.
Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different.
Put a label on each bucket.
Their website has a better explanation than I can give in this post, but I'll sum up the appeal of this system as quoted from their site: "There's only one place anything can ever be."
Usefully, part of this method is creating a directory for the rest of the system.
So if you're like me and tend to shove things wherever only to lose track of it later, this is a great system—especially when used in conjunction with the Zettelkasten Method (see below).
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Zettelkasten Method
Originally devised as an extensive paper-based knowledge management system, Zettelkasten is meant to easily add new entries to a knowledge base while giving each one a unique ID for easy 'linking.'
The creator of this method said 'it is not important where you place the note, as long as you can link to it.'
As with the Johnny Decimal system, I can't explain it super succinctly (nor can the website, if I'm being honest), so I'll include a link in a future reblog for a video that gave me an excellent run-down of the basics.
Setting up your own system
An organization system is only useful if you can actually, y'know, use it.
It can be fun to set up a super-detailed organization system with predetermined categories for everything, but is it easy for you to use? How will you navigate it?
Making decisions
There will be a lot of decisions to make as you set up your system. The only set-in-stone rule I follow is... don't set anything in stone. It's okay if you decide something that doesn't work later on.
Figuring out your categories
My advice: go fairly broad. You can always sub-categorize. I'm going to go over my own wikis for Athenaeum and Rocket Boosters in detail in a later post, but here are the starting top-level categories I'd recommend for worldbuilders:
A meta category for notes about your database, templates, and any relevant research you've done.
Characters, including main characters, minor characters, and important figures
Worldbuilding
In the last category, which is the main reason for the existence of my wiki, I might have:
Culture
History
Locations
Organizations
Lore (if relevant)
Technology
Transportation
I'll go over the nuances of these 'main' subcategories in that future post I mentioned. In other words, the stuff that actually goes in those categories!
Determining the importance and relevance of worldbuilding elements
You'll need to figure out whether a topic is complex enough to deserve its own entry, or if it should be a sub-heading under another entry. It's okay if you decide on both! I have short subheadings under some entries that amount to "see [link to main entry on that topic]."
I've also decided to expand subheadings into their own topics, and I've removed topics as their own entry and shoved them under subheadings. I do this a lot, in fact! So it's okay if you don't know.
Templates
Will you be creating several of one type of entry?
Individual character profiles
Towns and cities
Factions
(to name a few)
It might be handy to figure out the basic types of information you'll need about each of those things and create a template for them.
A character template might have spaces for the basics, such as name, role, age, and so on.
Some characters will have a lot more information, and some might have even less than what your template dictates! And that's fine.
A word of warning about using system-creation as procrastination
Creating a wiki can be a daunting task. You might decide it's not for you, and that's okay. But you might also decide to go headlong into the process and work on every minute detail, and that is also okay, but.
But.
Beware of using your wiki as an excuse to procrastinate your actual writing/session preparation. Yes, use it to keep track of all the lore you've injected into your manuscript/campaign/whatever, just make sure it stays in its place as a companion to your main project rather than becoming your main project.
How formal should your entries be?
Honestly this one's entirely up to you. I have a mix. Some entries are written like Wikipedia entries with a thorough explanation of the topic with proper punctuation and formatting, while others are simply bullet-point lists of thoughts and ideas that I can return to at a later date.
What methods do you use to keep track of your lore and worldbuilding? Let me know in a reblog or comment!
And please make sure to check the notes. I'll be reblogging with links, and then reblogging that reblog to make sure they're, y'know, actually visible in the notes.
#wiki#worldbuilding#writing advice#writeblr#writeblr community#resource#worldbuilding wiki#obsidian#zettelkasten#resource by keyboardandquill
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Many Sentences Monday!
i was tagged by @meadowlarkx & @thelordofgifs to share some fic! i'm super self indulgent, so here's the first scene of a "maglor comes to aman" fic with a twist.
1: The Pipe.
The little room is not decorated how he would expect.
Though of course it is exactly as it should be. There are the many intricately woven banisters, hung along the walls, clearly Maedhros’ choices, his style. There are the gouache paintings of leaping long-legged horses, their features exaggerated by movement, so dynamic they seem almost birdlike, painted plainly by Fingon’s hand. There’s the huge padded armchair in a tasteful shade of forest-green—Maedhros—and the short coat of brilliant crimson slung over its back—Fingon—and the tangle of vines outside the windows and the short-legged hound on the duvet and the tabby cats outside and the ornate teal-and-lilac service set on the counter, certainly gifted because neither of them would pick it, and the open easternmost window and the smell of roasting garlic.
It is the things which are not there, which he has come to expect.
It is the outhouse, the lack of indoor plumbing, the candle-gems set into the walls, look of slight confusion on the face of the servant when he turns to feel for the light switch. It is the realization that he cannot call; cannot send a telegram; that is had not occurred to him to pack a typewriter and so all his correspondence and his writing will again be hand; that his poems, should they ever again be published in this land, will need to be painstakingly copied, word by word, onto the parchment.
It ought to be easy to fall back into it. He had missed it, he tries to remember. He had thought the world noisy and overwhelming. He had wanted to run from it. He’d seen soot stains on trees that had once been virginal, had once been white, and his head had spun with it. He had watched the factory-smoke rise and thought it unlovely and unworthy of living for. He had stared at the monstrous bulk of a locomotive, had tasted its bitter smoke on his tongue, and felt the awfulness and sublimity of invention as he had at the gates of Angband.
And yet he is happy that he has taken along his gramophone.
No one had expected him.
News of the boats do not come; gossip travels through word of mouth and webs of osanwë across the city and into the countryside, but his hosts are out hunting. There are two servants only in the house; a quiet young maiden, barely seventy, there to mind the horses and the goats, and a man who had clearly once been a soldier, watching the house in the owners’ absence.
They speak to him in Sindarin, faintly accented with entirely different accents. The maiden, Cinnogil, lives there full-time, though mostly with the animals; she is responsible for the horses’ training and upkeep, and to this duty she dedicates herself with a fierce passion. He does not ask what brings her out of her house so young, as he would have asked in another life.
The man, Singdan, is there only some of the time. He lives close by, he says. He comes and helps with the cooking and the cleaning, at times, in exchange for gems and for fresh cuts of hart and for legal work, now and again.
But really it can barely be called an estate.
“They keep a room for you, I think,” Singdan tells him, as he helps him unload his mule and stack his luggage in a jumbled heap in the mud room. The short-legged dog weaves around their ankles when make their way down the hall, lit by sparkling silver gems, the walls decorated with rugs far too warm and too heavy for the climate. “They have for as long as I have known them.”
The room—his room—is at the end of the hall. His eyes trace the walls; the simpler, more elegant decorations in silver, the blue and white bedspread, the lyre and the flute, the inkwell, the bottle of aged rum with the books on the bookshelf, the ceramic horses on the writing table. Someone has hung a change of clothes for him in the corner closet.
There is no dust, no trace of disuse. Only one thing out of place—the mahogany pipe on the windowsill.
He crosses the room and picks it up, holding it up to the light. It is well-used. Warm from the sun streaming in through the glass, streaked slightly on the inside.
Out of them three only Maedhros smokes. Likely he had sat here, and had the window open.
(Why is there so much guilt, with that thought?)
“Shall you come and dine,” Singdan asks, “while we wait?”
Thank you. He is not hungry.
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tagging @eilinelsghost @outofangband @melestasflight @polutrope @grey-gazania @that-angry-noldo @searchingforserendipity25 & @polutrope @jouissants anyone else who hasn't done it yet and wants in!
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As promised, I managed to get rhe flash sale tracking (and new item tracking) working on the new (hopefully cheaper) system.
The previous system I was running was called an Azure App Service. This is essentially a simple version of a full blown virtual machine server. I was not using most of its features that I was paying for because it's an all or nothing deal. Almost all the tools were running as so called webjobs on that server. This is extremely inefficient, but it is really easy to set up.
Now I am moving the tools that are capable of it to a thing called Azure Functions. Its basically the same thing but even more slimmed down and entirely on demand. It's essentially just the webjobs part without the web server side. This allows me to host timed functions, such as the flash sale tracking, without the overhead of an entire server above it. The major thing for Azure Functions is that there is a monthly free grant of 1 million requests or 400000 gigabyte of data consumption. I won't reach either of those limits on a monthly basis. I'll mostly just be paying for storage and database usage now, which will bring hosting cost down drastically!
This is not going to be compatible with things like the discord bot or the website itself for the skin tester. But I have ideas for that as well.
Another upside is that I was finally forced to update from .net framework 4.8 to netcore6. Once I rebuild other parts I have more options such as Linux hosting which is most commonly cheaper compared to windows hosting that I was required to use up to now.
Once I get more things working you will know 🫡
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DEV04 - Pican'te (trowel pico thoughts)
almost a year ago, amidst bbsprint development and trowel development i have decided to ask my small playerbase about the editor's fate and settled on further expanding the scope of the game's demo and allow people to make their own levels while they wait for the full versions. this would be done through something called "trowel pico", which is a version that is intentionally much more limited than the regular trowel, and is web-based for maximum compatibility (because trowel is a windows app that could probably be compiled to linux and macOS)
the route that leads to me developing trowel pico is a route that would amplify the game's deliverable and development time in general because i would need to juggle some things as well as 2 versions of a program to achieve the same thing with different targets in mind. i however believe it's gonna be worth it.
as it stands right now, trowel pico itself is about 80% feature complete, now reaching feature parity with trowel desktop in many aspects and able to generate a project file (yes, now they export project files by default instead of just the stage) that is cross-compatible with trowel desktop (except you can't load in stages from trowel desktop because i have intentionally added a guard to prevent using stages generated with desktop for the future)
i find that i am making some gui compromises compared to trowel desktop in favor of development speed, but i can't really stop myself from polishing the gui a little bit more adding things i've always wanted to add to a game/editor for game (read: startup screens) and as such, i have reached a milestone by finally being able to implement the startup splash artwork i made a few months ago as well as the startup jingle i made like 2 days ago
have a video.
i do not quite have a release date, because although trowel pico is 80% complete, Scaffold (the online service hosting and serving stage info for the update's plans) still needs to be made and that is its own beast, but at least, i do not have to worry as much about a wildly customizable gui for that one, the bulk of the development there is backend.
i'm thinking of letting people in my server try out trowel pico before anybody else while scaffold is being developed.
now, there's one question i left for last intentionally
one may wonder "why did you make these separate projects instead of implementing them in the game itself?"
the reason is that i wanted to challenge myself by making things for one common goal in different toolkits, that's how trowel desktop started, since it's made in monogame
second i wanted to update the editor irrespective of the game, and third, which is trowel pico's reason for existing, is that doing things in web is terrible as it is
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“Innovators and Leaders: Unveiling the Top IT Companies in the US”
Title: “Innovators and Leaders: Unveiling the Top IT Companies in the US”
In the fast-paced world of technology, a select group of companies stands at the forefront, steering the direction of innovation and reshaping the digital landscape. The United States, a hotbed of technological advancement, hosts an elite cadre of IT companies whose impact transcends boundaries. Let’s delve into the realms of these trailblazers, the vanguards of the industry, who continue to redefine possibilities and set new benchmarks in the realm of technology.
1. Apple Inc.: Pioneering the Perfect Union of Innovation and Elegance At the epicenter of consumer electronics and software, Apple Inc. reigns supreme. Recognized for its sleek hardware – iPhones, Macs, iPads – and a sophisticated software ecosystem encompassing iOS and macOS, Apple’s commitment to seamless integration and groundbreaking design remains unparalleled.
2. Microsoft Corporation: Empowering Every Individual and Organization on the Planet Microsoft, a tech behemoth, extends a diverse portfolio ranging from software products and cloud services to cutting-edge hardware. Windows OS, Office Suite, Azure Cloud – each element a testament to its commitment to innovation, enterprise solutions, and empowering global connectivity.
3. Vee Technologies: Vee Technologies is one of the Top IT companies in USA which stands as a leading provider of comprehensive IT services, offering a wide array of solutions designed to meet the diverse needs of businesses across various industries. Vee Technologies as one Top IT companies in USA specializes in crafting tailored software solutions that cater to specific business requirements. Their expertise in software development spans applications, platforms, and systems, ensuring alignment with clients’ unique operational needs.
4. Amazon: Beyond Borders, Beyond Commerce Amidst its colossal e-commerce empire, Amazon’s crown jewel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), stands as a commanding force in cloud computing. It spearheads the provision of scalable computing power, storage solutions, and an array of cloud-based services.
5. Alphabet Inc. (Google): Redefining Information Access and Technological Innovation Google, the epitome of innovation, ventures beyond its hallmark search engine. Google Cloud, Android OS, and an extensive suite of software applications illustrate its commitment to shaping information accessibility and fostering technological advancement.
6. Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook): Building Connections in a Digital Sphere Meta Platforms, once Facebook, focuses on social networking and leaps into the realms of virtual reality (Oculus), augmented reality, and the pioneering developments within the metaverse.
7. IBM: Where Innovation Meets Enterprise Solutions IBM’s arsenal encompasses a gamut of IT services, consulting, and enterprise solutions, including cognitive computing technologies like Watson, geared towards reshaping industries and bolstering technological capabilities.
8. Oracle Corporation: Fortifying Businesses with Comprehensive Solutions A stalwart in database software and enterprise solutions, Oracle offers a suite of cloud applications and business software, catering to diverse business needs.
9. Intel Corporation: Empowering Computing with Semiconductors Intel’s prowess in semiconductor manufacturing crafts the beating heart of countless computing devices through its microprocessors and hardware components.
10. Cisco Systems: Forging Networks and Security in the Digital Age Cisco, a pioneer in networking solutions, fortifies businesses with networking hardware, software, cybersecurity measures, and innovations in IoT technologies.
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How to download Instagram photos on pc
Downloading Instagram photos on a PC can be done using various methods, including using online web tools or browser extensions. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do it:
Method 1: Using an Online Instagram Photo Downloader:
1. Open your web browser on your PC and go to the Instagram website (https://www.instagram.com).
2. Log in to your Instagram account if you haven't already.
3. Navigate to the Instagram photo you want to download.
4. Right-click on the photo and select "Copy Link Address" or a similar option, depending on your browser.
5. Open a new tab or window in your web browser and visit an online Instagram photo downloader website. There are several available; you can use websites like "DownloadGram," "InstaDownloader," or "SaveFromWeb." In Dj downloader.com is important.
6. On the downloader website, you'll find a text box where you can paste the Instagram photo's URL. Right-click in the text box and select "Paste" to insert the URL you copied in step 4.
7. Click the "Download" or similar button on the website. The photo will be processed, and a download link will be provided. In Dj downloader .com is great.
8. Click the download link to save the Instagram photo to your PC.
Method 2: Using a Browser Extension (Google Chrome):
1. Open Google Chrome on your PC.
2. Go to the Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore) and search for "Instagram photo downloader" or a similar keyword.
3. Browse the available extensions and choose one that suits your needs and has good reviews. You can consider extensions like "Downloader for Instagram," "InstaG Downloader," or similar.
4. Click on the extension you want to install, then click the "Add to Chrome" button.
5. Confirm the installation by clicking "Add Extension" in the pop-up window.
6. Once the extension is installed, an icon or button related to the extension will appear in your Chrome toolbar.
7. Go to the Instagram website (https://www.instagram.com) and log in to your account.
8. Navigate to the Instagram photo you want to download.
9. Click on the extension's icon in your Chrome toolbar. It should detect and provide a download link for the photo.
10. Click the download link to save the Instagram photo to your PC.
Please keep in mind that downloading and using Instagram content should be done in compliance with Instagram's terms of service and respect for the rights of content creators. Always obtain proper permissions when necessary, and be aware of any changes in Instagram's policies regarding content downloads.
What are the best apps For downloading photos on pc?
There are several apps available for downloading photos on a PC, each with its own set of features and capabilities. The best app for you depends on your specific needs and preferences. Here are some popular options:
To view from the Instagram Copy Caption page
click.
1. Internet Download Manager (IDM): IDM is a widely used download manager that can download photos, videos, and other files from websites. It integrates seamlessly with web browsers and offers advanced download features, including scheduling and batch downloads.
2. Free Download Manager (FDM): FDM is a free and open-source download manager that supports downloading photos, videos, and various file types. It has a user-friendly interface and provides download acceleration.
3. Bulk Image Downloader: This specialized tool is designed for downloading images in bulk from websites, including galleries and thumbnail pages. It supports various image hosting sites and automates the process of image extraction.
4. 4K Stogram: 4K Stogram is a dedicated Instagram photo and video downloader for Windows. It allows you to download photos and videos from Instagram profiles, hashtags, and locations. It's user-friendly and offers a simple way to back up your Instagram content.
To view from the Instagram Generator Hashtag page click.
5. JDownloader: JDownloader is an open-source download manager that can handle downloads from various sources, including file-hosting services, image-hosting sites, and social media platforms. It's highly customizable and supports automation.
6. Image Downloader: This is a browser extension available for Chrome and Firefox that simplifies the process of downloading images from websites. You can select and download multiple images with ease.
7. Microsoft Snipping Tool (Built-in): Windows comes with a built-in Snipping Tool that allows you to capture and save screenshots of specific areas on your screen. This can be useful for saving images from websites.
8. Picasa: While Google has officially discontinued Picasa, you can still find the latest version of this photo management software available for download. It can help you organize and download photos from your Google Photos library.
9. FastStone Image Viewer: While primarily an image viewer, FastStone Image Viewer also provides the ability to download images from the web. It's a lightweight and versatile program.
10. Save Images (Firefox Extension): If you use the Firefox browser, you can install the "Save Images" extension, which simplifies the process of saving images from webpages.
Remember to use these apps responsibly and respect copyright and privacy laws when downloading and using images from the internet. Always obtain proper permissions when necessary, especially for copyrighted content.
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