About me and this website
Me
Howdy, I’m Dave Gauer. I’ve worked in web technologies since the late 1990s.
What I’m up to right now!
Some interests: computer programming of all kinds, Linux/BSD/Unix, art, books (genre fiction, computing, history, biographies, art monographs), film, music (metal!), boardgames, and watching small creatures in the back yard
If you’re ready for the deep dive, check out my cards (mostly short) notes about various topics.
Me elsewhere:
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@ratfactor at mastodon.art (art and technology, general chat)
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github.com/ratfactor (personal programming projects)
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ratfactor.SDF.org (mostly Gopher posts, haven’t been active as of late)
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goodreads.com/ratfactor (for anything books - am interested in alternatives)
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@ratfactor at twitter.com(I’m out. See Mastodon above)
I sometimes use this avatar:
It’s the "Bob" version of Tux the Penguin (a la Slackware Linux). I’ll often use that on tech-oriented sites. It’s cropped from a watercolor I did in my sketchbook quite a while ago:
"Ancient King Slackware Computes at the Altar"
And sometimes I use this avatar, which is another watercolor I did expressly to use as an avatar:
"Ratfactor"
This website
I finally documented my tooling here: Rat-Tools!
This website has:
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No advertising
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No tracking/cookies
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No JavaScript unless used by a tool on the page
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No bloat (check out ratfactor’s css file and this page about its styles (and related tangents))
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No so-called "AI" content (What Sandra writes here (idiomrottning.org) sums up my feelings beautifully.)
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Of course there’s a humans.txt (updated in this glorious year of 2023)
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And robots.txt is courtesy this list (neil-clarke.com)
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This website has a todo page, which I made and rarely think about.
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Home page is currently under 100 Kb total: 1mb.club | 512kb.club | 250kb.club
Browse this website with your favorite terminal program or screen reader!
There’s an "RSS" (actually Atom) feed link at the top of most pages. I have awhole page about that.
This may be controversial, but I strongly believe in allowing access to this website via both HTTPS and HTTP. Unencrypted HTTP can be accessed by extremely low-power machines and extremely simple software. TLS is very important, but it does come with a non-trivial complexity and computational cost. In short, I agree with Consider Disabling HTTPS Auto Redirects (1mb.club).
RATFACTOR.COM HAS BEEN UNDER CONTINUOUS CONSTRUCTION SINCE 1997!
I try to follow the wisdom that Cool URIs don’t change (w3.org).
This website is designed to last (jeffhuang.com).
It’s a bit of a "digital garden" and a forever world and also a One-Tree website.
You could make a website too! The "Start a website" instructions at LandChad.net look pretty good to me. It’s remarkably similar to the setup I’m running these days. Also check out Derek Sivers’s Tech Independence (sive.rs).