social.pollux.casa

You don't know what #religion I am?

That's normal, I keep that to myself. Maybe it's because I'm French and in my country secularism is a dogma. For me, religion is part of intimacy and privacy.

Block non-human crawlers with lighttpd

2025-04-20 19:05

Recently, I've put a copy of some ZIM files online with kiwix-server. I posted the url of this site on the Fediverse and, a few days later, the little server was a bit overloaded. The logs showed that the site was being crawled by search engines and AI training bots. There was no reason to let them. A robots.txt file calmed some, but not others.

Analysing user agents and IP addresses is not the answer, because, everything is done to make it complicated (randomisation, many datacenter origins). I thought about Cloudflare protection, Google captcha or the open source solution Anubis. All of them require javascript to be enabled on the human browsers.

After several tests, I have found a simple method to stop these crawlers.

The principle

When a connection arrives on the web server, it checks to see if the request comes with a cookie. If it does not, the web server redirects the browser to an HTML form that asks the user to tick a checkbox and submit. If the user submits the form correctly, he or she receives a cookie and is redirected to the previously requested page. The new request is made with a cookie. So, the web server does its job and send the expected content.

Detail on my blog

I think I've managed to curb AI crawlers with a simple HTML form that drops a cookie.

I'll see if it holds up and make a post about it.

It protect my #kiwix server

https://zim.pollux.casa/

w is the preferred subdomain for smolweb sites

smolweb news

A simple way for a website to indicate that it adheres to the smolweb guidelines is to use the subdomain w instead of www.

This short subdomain is very much in the spirit of smolweb.

This is not a requirement, just a suggestion.

w.example.org is visually different from www.example.org or example.org.

#smolweb #smallweb

New smolweb symbol could be <w> in monospaced font

The angle brackets < and > recall HTML tags, giving a nod to the DIY, hand-coded nature of many smolweb sites. It signals that the web can be understandable and writeable by humans, not just something consumed through complex platforms. It carries the scent of rawness and control, not abstraction and obfuscation.

A single, lowercase w stands in for "web" in a modest, almost shy way. It’s not the grand "www" of the mainstream web, but a small w, lowercase and self-aware. It hints at an alternative web, not the bloated, surveillance-driven one, but a quieter, slower, more intimate one.

<w> is compact, echoing the idea that less is more. That brevity is not a compromise but a strength. It suggests that meaning and value can come in small, lightweight package, just like a well-crafted static HTML page.

The whole symbol feels like something you might type into a terminal or a text editor. It invites tinkering. It feels like the smolweb: accessible, understandable, and remixable.

So yeah, <w> quietly says a lot: it’s webby, small, and stripped-down, no frills, all signal. Perfect shorthand for the smolweb !

https://smolweb.org/

If you run a single user #GoToSocial instance, maybe you would like to get more toots about a specific subject in your timeline.
#FediBuzz relay could help you. You can subscribe to a specific hashtag fake-account and then receive toots it re-toots.

more info here https://relay.fedi.buzz/

For example, you can follow @tag-gotosocial

I'm looking for a new symbol for the #smolweb
On smolweb.org, I use a small w between brackets : (w)
But I find it ugly, it seems to be a failed batman logo ^^

I think about ~w~, because tilde is part of smolweb community, and it is used for user directory on UNIX systems and web server. But it is not very fun. There are other possibilities: sw~, ~w, w~...

What would you use to symbolize smolweb?

Katy Perry is far less inspiring than Greta Thunberg

I've switched to @librewolf browser. Mozilla's latest announcements have made up my mind.

#Librewolf is really the good compromise: #Security #Privacy modern #Features

If you use Firefox, you should give it a try. You can use Firefox extensions and, even, Firefox Sync if you want to sync with Firefox for few days (you need to enable this option in settings)

https://librewolf.net/

I need your point of view about a login method.

On pages.casa, I want to add the possibility to edit/create blog post directly in the browser (simpler than FTP/SFTP file transfer).

To avoid users to manage a password which could differ from their FTP/SFTP account, I'd like to propose to log in with a link sent by email:

• User opens the login page
• Enter her/his email associated to the account.
• System sends a one shot login link available 20 minutes
• User open the link with her/his browser and confirm to use it to connect.
• Access to back-office is done

#php #security #dev

International recognition of #Palestine 🇵🇸

As of March 2025, the State of Palestine is recognized as a sovereign state by 147 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, or just over 75% of all UN members.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_Palestine

I haven't found the right tool to build a smolweb site, yet

read on my blog

There are plenty of tools out there to build static websites such as Hugo, Zola, Pelican, Publii… they're powerful and well-made. But they all assume you're building your site locally. You install them on your computer, write and edit your content there, and then push the result to a server. That's fine if you always write from the same machine. But I don't. I write from different devices, depending on where I am and what I have on hand, so relying on a local setup doesn't fit my workflow.

On the other side, you have all classic CMS tools running directly on a server. But most of them are bloated, over-engineered, or just too heavy for what I consider a proper smolweb site.

I've tried to make my own workarounds. I wrote small scripts like ergol-http, which converts Gemini capsules to HTML on the fly, and smolmd (used on pages.casa), which just publishes a directory full of Markdown files. These helped me get closer to what I want, but they still rely on direct server access (FTP, SSH…), and that's not always ideal or accessible.

What I'm looking for is a lightweight tool, something minimal yet functional. A simple PHP app (because PHP is still one of the easiest languages to deploy on a shared server) that offers a Markdown editor/textarea in the browser. It should permit to upload images, store files in a structured directory tree that reflects the site's hierarchy, and take care of rendering clean, simple, and semantic HTML pages, and its rss feed. That's all. No JavaScript frameworks, no databases, no unnecessary features, just something small and sustainable that follows the smolweb.org approach: simplicity, readability, and low resource usage.

I haven't found it yet. But maybe I'll end up building it.

Have you some ideas?

Just stumbled upon https://portals.org/ and wow 🤩​

These real-life video portals connecting cities across the world Vilnius, Philadelphia, Dublin, Piauí are the kind of thing that makes the internet, and humanity, feel magical.

Instant hope 🌍

Today, I have srarted to prepare the garden for the new season. I plan to plant potatoes, beans, courgettes, butternuts, tomatoes and carrots.
🥔 🫘 🥒 🍅 🥕🎃

➡️ Smolweb

#smolweb #gemini

Has Trump understood that these tariffs will be paid by Americans? 🤔

What if the U.S. cut off Big Tech from Europe? A nightmare for many European firms

2025-02-02 22:20

Imagine waking up to the news that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have been ordered by the U.S. government to cease providing their IT services to Europe. No more Azure, no more Google Cloud, no more AWS. The fallout would be immediate and catastrophic for countless European businesses, exposing a deep dependency that few truly acknowledge.

read more...

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Hard to wake up this Monday after the weekend's hour change. The DST system is really a mess.

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I've restarted the migration of my phpc.social account to this one. The first time I did it, my #gotosocial instance was not fully operational due to a wasm incompatibility with the server's cpu. Only a quarter of my followers had changed their subscription. I had to wait 30 days before trying again.
Now all my old followers have migrated to my new account 😊

Welcome back! 👋