It’s not fair to compare a state-of-the-art-AI-assisted proprietary tool from a trillion-dollar corporation with a hand-coded free and open tool from a small not-for-profit cooperative.
(The latter works.)
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170758#discussioncomment-14233260
#BigTech#AI #bullshit#GitHub#SmallTech #craft#Codeberg#Forgejo
I’m speaking at Defuse – Design For Use – at The Sugar Club in Dublin on November 10th at 7PM.
The theme is “Reclaiming Design: Taking Back Purpose in an Automated Age” and my talk’s titled “Think small.”
It’s first come, first served, so mark your calendars and show up early (and find me and say hi if you do!) :)
#ThinkSmall #DefuseDublin #IXDA #IXDADublin #SmallTech #SmallWeb #events #Dublin #Ireland #tech #design #ethics
🎶 One of these things is not like the other…🎶
Can you spot the difference kids?
#SmallWeb #SmallTech #BigWeb #BigTech #LinkedIn #PersonalWebSite
I’m speaking at Defuse – Design For Use – at The Sugar Club in Dublin on November 10th at 7PM.
The theme is “Reclaiming Design: Taking Back Purpose in an Automated Age” and my talk’s titled “Think small.”
It’s first come, first served, so mark your calendars and show up early (and find me and say hi if you do!) :)
#ThinkSmall #DefuseDublin #IXDA #IXDADublin #SmallTech #SmallWeb #events #Dublin #Ireland #tech #design #ethics
Coming soon (likely this afternoon, I’m writing tests and docs and updating examples as we speak)…
This is the sort of thing you’ll be able to do with Markdown pages. Just pop any arbitrary JavaScript you want in the new script block in the front matter and then import and use components as well as plain old JavaScript tagged template variable interpolation (not shown in this example) inside your Markdown.
The screen has all the code (sans the end of the last line of CSS and the closing tags for the
Rewriting the Windows section of Kitten’s installation instructions.
Update: it’s live now.
#Kitten #SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #dev #HTML #CSS #JavaScript #NodeJS #FOSS #tech #Windows #Microsoft #israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #Palestine #Gaza #WestBank #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #BoycottDivestmentSanctions #BDS #FreePalestine
The new integrated Markdown parser I’ve been implementing in Kitten has been kicking my ass for the past few weeks but I think I finally have it fully working and seamlessly so. Expect a new release this/next week that brings the parsing of Markdown pages (.page.md files) in your apps up to the standard of the recently-improved runtime Markdown parsing in Kitten HTML tagged-template strings (within <markdown>…</markdown> blocks).
The coolest thing is I was able to implement this without introducing any new syntax. In fact, I was able to simplify things so that you can now add arbitrary JavaScript to your Markdown pages within a multi-line script block in the YAML front matter (script: |) and use JavaScript string interpolation syntax in your Markdown (and, of course, Kitten components and conditionals, which, themselves, rely on string interpolation).
The only place where you have to deviate from standard Markdown in your Markdown pages is if you have JavaScript string interpolations or Kitten components/conditionals in code fences within your Markdown. In that case, you’ll have to escape them (e.g., <\${Component} />, \<if \${something}>something\</if>, etc.). And, to be fair, the person most impacted by this is likely me as the Kitten documentation at https://kitten.small-web.org is written in Kitten so I had a lot of escaping to do. But for any other use case, it means that things should just work and work exactly as they do in JavaScript pages (page.js files).
Anyway, so this is going to be a breaking change so I thought I’d give you (the three of you playing with Kitten right now?) a heads up. Of course, I’ll be updating the documentation to reflect all this.
(Remember, Kitten is in pre-release and it’s the framework I’m building/using to create Catalyst – the Small Web hosting solution – and Yarn – a small web – peer to peer – personal site app. So Kitten isn’t the means, not the end. And, at least until the Version 1 API freeze, things can and will break. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from playing with it now and, to be fair, at this point, such breaking changes should become rarer and rarer).
💕
#Kitten #SmallWeb#SmallTech #web #dev#Markdown#JavaScript#HTML#CSS#JavaScript#NodeJS
Bloody hell, finally, I think I’m done with the Markdown support rewrite in Kitten.
The Markdown rule for interpreting four spaces as code fences has been the biggest pain in my neck during this whole ordeal but, bitching aside, it means the parser is now more accurate and thus stronger for it.
If all goes well, expect a Monday release :)
💕
#Kitten #SmallWeb#SmallTech #web #dev#Markdown#HTML#CSS#JavaScript#NodeJS
The new integrated Markdown parser I’ve been implementing in Kitten has been kicking my ass for the past few weeks but I think I finally have it fully working and seamlessly so. Expect a new release this/next week that brings the parsing of Markdown pages (.page.md files) in your apps up to the standard of the recently-improved runtime Markdown parsing in Kitten HTML tagged-template strings (within <markdown>…</markdown> blocks).
The coolest thing is I was able to implement this without introducing any new syntax. In fact, I was able to simplify things so that you can now add arbitrary JavaScript to your Markdown pages within a multi-line script block in the YAML front matter (script: |) and use JavaScript string interpolation syntax in your Markdown (and, of course, Kitten components and conditionals, which, themselves, rely on string interpolation).
The only place where you have to deviate from standard Markdown in your Markdown pages is if you have JavaScript string interpolations or Kitten components/conditionals in code fences within your Markdown. In that case, you’ll have to escape them (e.g., <\${Component} />, \<if \${something}>something\</if>, etc.). And, to be fair, the person most impacted by this is likely me as the Kitten documentation at https://kitten.small-web.org is written in Kitten so I had a lot of escaping to do. But for any other use case, it means that things should just work and work exactly as they do in JavaScript pages (page.js files).
Anyway, so this is going to be a breaking change so I thought I’d give you (the three of you playing with Kitten right now?) a heads up. Of course, I’ll be updating the documentation to reflect all this.
(Remember, Kitten is in pre-release and it’s the framework I’m building/using to create Catalyst – the Small Web hosting solution – and Yarn – a small web – peer to peer – personal site app. So Kitten isn’t the means, not the end. And, at least until the Version 1 API freeze, things can and will break. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from playing with it now and, to be fair, at this point, such breaking changes should become rarer and rarer).
💕
#Kitten #SmallWeb#SmallTech #web #dev#Markdown#JavaScript#HTML#CSS#JavaScript#NodeJS
The new integrated Markdown parser I’ve been implementing in Kitten has been kicking my ass for the past few weeks but I think I finally have it fully working and seamlessly so. Expect a new release this/next week that brings the parsing of Markdown pages (.page.md files) in your apps up to the standard of the recently-improved runtime Markdown parsing in Kitten HTML tagged-template strings (within <markdown>…</markdown> blocks).
The coolest thing is I was able to implement this without introducing any new syntax. In fact, I was able to simplify things so that you can now add arbitrary JavaScript to your Markdown pages within a multi-line script block in the YAML front matter (script: |) and use JavaScript string interpolation syntax in your Markdown (and, of course, Kitten components and conditionals, which, themselves, rely on string interpolation).
The only place where you have to deviate from standard Markdown in your Markdown pages is if you have JavaScript string interpolations or Kitten components/conditionals in code fences within your Markdown. In that case, you’ll have to escape them (e.g., <\${Component} />, \<if \${something}>something\</if>, etc.). And, to be fair, the person most impacted by this is likely me as the Kitten documentation at https://kitten.small-web.org is written in Kitten so I had a lot of escaping to do. But for any other use case, it means that things should just work and work exactly as they do in JavaScript pages (page.js files).
Anyway, so this is going to be a breaking change so I thought I’d give you (the three of you playing with Kitten right now?) a heads up. Of course, I’ll be updating the documentation to reflect all this.
(Remember, Kitten is in pre-release and it’s the framework I’m building/using to create Catalyst – the Small Web hosting solution – and Yarn – a small web – peer to peer – personal site app. So Kitten isn’t the means, not the end. And, at least until the Version 1 API freeze, things can and will break. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from playing with it now and, to be fair, at this point, such breaking changes should become rarer and rarer).
💕
#Kitten #SmallWeb#SmallTech #web #dev#Markdown#JavaScript#HTML#CSS#JavaScript#NodeJS
Ppl of Mastodon. Please help educate the normies about independent, small tech and self hosting. Not only fancy stuff like docker/VS etc and home servers, but cheap shared webspace online, small CMS, wikis, favourite federated or OS apps, (mine are Masto, Lemmy, Grav, Jekyll, Ghost and others). Introduce them to what is actually out here. Try not to expect total purity! They want to be free, not join a cult 😎😇
#smalltech #smolweb #selfhosting #freeweb #academia #academicchatter
🥳 New Kitten Release
Housekeeping:
• Updated runtime version to Node version 22.18.0 (latest LTS).
• Removed --experimental-global-customevent in node launch command (as CustomEvent is no longer behing the CLI flag since Node v19.0.0)
• Renamed --experimental-loader flag to --loader as the experimental prefix is no longer required.
Enjoy!
💕
#Kitten#KittenRelease #SmallWeb#SmallTech #web #dev#HTML#JavaScript#CSS#NodeJS
Ah, and also, forgot to mention this change:
Improved:
• Debugging your Kitten app is now easier when you run it using `INSPECT=true kitten …` as the Node runtime is launched using the `--inspect-brk` tag instead of the `--inspect` tag. This means that execution will wait for your debugger (e.g., Chromium’s DevTools at `chrome://inspect`, etc.) to connect before starting the server. This makes it possible to hit breakpoints that might previously have been impossible to reach as they occured before you had a chance to run the debugger.
Full change log:
https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#2025-08-12
#Kitten #SmallWeb #SmallTech #NodeJS #debugger #debugging #web #dev #JavaScript
🥳 New Kitten Release
Housekeeping:
• Updated runtime version to Node version 22.18.0 (latest LTS).
• Removed --experimental-global-customevent in node launch command (as CustomEvent is no longer behing the CLI flag since Node v19.0.0)
• Renamed --experimental-loader flag to --loader as the experimental prefix is no longer required.
Enjoy!
💕
#Kitten#KittenRelease #SmallWeb#SmallTech #web #dev#HTML#JavaScript#CSS#NodeJS
Ppl of Mastodon. Please help educate the normies about independent, small tech and self hosting. Not only fancy stuff like docker/VS etc and home servers, but cheap shared webspace online, small CMS, wikis, favourite federated or OS apps, (mine are Masto, Lemmy, Grav, Jekyll, Ghost and others). Introduce them to what is actually out here. Try not to expect total purity! They want to be free, not join a cult 😎😇
#smalltech #smolweb #selfhosting #freeweb #academia #academicchatter
🥳 New Kitten release!
Markdown and general renderer fixes.
Fixed:
• Nested Markdown sections rendering bug.
• Detection of components in Markdown where the opening tag spans multiple lines.
• Support for returning a component as a top-level object in a page.
• Slots in Markdown now work as they should (make sure you add them as block-level items, so with a leading and trailing empty line)
Enjoy!
💕
#Kitten#KittenRelease #SmallWeb#SmallTech#Markdown #rendering#HTML #web #dev
🥳 New Kitten Release
To GNU tar or not to GNU tar?
• Installing Kitten on Linux should no longer display a screenful of gibberish from the tar command.
You see, macOS, being special, includes BSD tar, not GNU tar, and adds a bunch of Mac-specific metadata and extended header keywords to archives that GNU tar on Linux machines then chokes on and regurgitates onto your screen as warnings.
With this release, Kitten’s packaging script expects GNU tar to be available on macOS and uses that instead of BSD tar.
The latest release of Kitten now installs without any warnings on Linux (at least on my Fedora Silverblue box).
Enjoy!
#Kitten#KittenRelease #SmallWeb#SmallTech#GNU#BSD#Darwin#macOS #tar
🎉 New Kitten¹ Release: A little housekeeping 🧹
Today’s release only concerns production servers:
• Kitten no longer counts all *hits* in its stats. You can still see which of your *pages* are most popular, etc., and see stats for missing URLs, etc., as before from either the web interface or the interactive shell, but not every hit is logged. Instead, you can see the latest 25 served routes in Kitten’s Settings (at /🐱/settings/state/requests/ via the web on your server).
- Kitten production servers now carry out an automatic daily maintenance restart at some time between 3AM and 5AM local server time. (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” as a Service™) This is to allow JSDB² tables a chance to compact themselves (especially important for high traffic/high mutation tables like sessions, so they don’t balloon up to take up all available memory on small VPS instances).
I don’t think anyone but us (Small Technology Foundation³) is running Kitten in production at the moment but, still. If you are playing with Kitten and experimenting with it in production, your servers will update to this latest version in a few hours.
Full details: https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#2025-07-29
:kitten: 💕
¹ https://kitten.small-web.org
² https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb
³ https://small-tech.org
This would be nice. Wonder if Small Technology Foundation would finally get some EU funding for our Small Web work if this were to happen.
One can hope.
https://small-tech.org/fund-us/
#SmallTech #SmallWeb#EUhttps://mastodon.cloud/@OpenForumEurope/114902018130916368
Looking forward to speaking at Defuse – Design for Use in Dublin on November 10th about breaking the rules and doing things differently (and yes, the Small Web).
Mark it on your calendars and come along if you’re free.
#design#IxDA#Dublin#Defuse#DefuseDublin #dublin #ireland #event#SmallTech #SmallWeb
Looking forward to speaking at Defuse – Design for Use in Dublin on November 10th about breaking the rules and doing things differently (and yes, the Small Web).
Mark it on your calendars and come along if you’re free.
#design#IxDA#Dublin#Defuse#DefuseDublin #dublin #ireland #event#SmallTech #SmallWeb
Also see Look Over There! – which you can easily deploy yourself on a tiny VPS – it’s how I’m redirecting our old sites to archive.org (https://look-over-there.small-web.org/)
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
![Screenshot: three windows: left side: Source of index.page.md, top-right browser showing running web app, bottom-right, source of Button and Reactions components.
Contents of windows:
index.page.md:
---
title: An interactive markdown page
script: |
import Reaction from './Reaction.fragment.js'
// Initialise database if necessary.
kitten.db.reactions ??= {}
kitten.db.reactions.Heart ??= 0
kitten.db.reactions.Confetti ??= 0
kitten.db.reactions.Smiley ??= 0
let page
export function onConnect (data) {
page = data.page
}
export function onReaction (data) {
kitten.db.reactions[data.type]++
page.send(kitten.html`<${Reaction} />`)
}
---
<page css>
# Hello!
While this is a __markdown__ page, I can easily layer interactivity by adding a simple component in a script block.
## Reactions{id=your-reactions}
<${Reaction} />
Browser (output):
Hello!
While this is a markdown page, I can easily layer interactivity by adding a simple component in a script block.
Reactions
Heart button: 5
Confetti button: 4
Smiley button: 3](https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/mastodon-aral/media_attachments/files/115/049/184/562/940/121/original/3683dc4fa5099f6b.png)
