I’m making considerations on how to design a simple initiative to keep Gaza in the news on Mastodon. By that, I mean the people from Gaza, not the news-media reports. What we need is to elevated and promote the Mastodon accounts of people who are from Gaza and are asking for donations.

If you have any ideas, reply to this post on Mastodon.

It all comes down to simple advertising.

I am not sure exactly how to do this yet but, I am feeling inclined to make use of the automated system that this website was previously using to advertise. Why not right? The advertisements themselves will feature things like: nature, plants, flowers, wildlife. So, it should be very simple, and then there should be a textual banner promoting Gaza. And then the page in the link could be just as simple as this one, saying just a few words and then having links back to the various profiles for people from Gaza.

Previously, I had it set up to post on four-hour intervals and in 44 languages.

Promotional only.

This would be a promotional initiative only, and there would be no facilitation of donations, and no transactions through the website. That’s not possible, I don’t know how to do that. Furthermore, it’s better to just expect that the means for donation are handled already on an individual basis. So, there would be no financial aspect tied together with the promotion, any donations made would simply use whatever methods are in place, and would be determined by the individual people involved.

The pages could contain lists of people asking for donations on Mastodon.

Maintaining lists for prospective donations to Gaza might be something this website could have. In that case, there would then need to be a disclaimer saying something like “If you require verification, you will need to do that on your own” but, it should also have messaging that will council potential donors that for small amounts, they should not be too strict. Requiring verification might present a major barrier, when the recipient might not be capable of any sort of verification. A simple statement that you are in Gaza should be sufficient.

Ideas, and input is welcome.

Please answer back to this posting on Mastodon if you have any good ideas about how this could be arranged. You can see that it is a very minimal-effort promotion-only type of thing. So, there would not be any dealing with money or financial things through the website. Thanks for reading this far, do your part and try to promote people from Gaza so that they can get donations. Everyone knows the situation, so I will keep the imagery positive, even though the situation is extreme dire.

When you are first new to mastodon, and you begin setting up your account, you make some basic selections. There is nothing unusual about that but, what do you do next? That’s the real aim of this article. What are your best next steps, and where is mastodon really headed as it changes to accomodate the rise in adoption?

Those are important questions to address but, first I will explain a little bit of an experiment that we have done here at DCKIM. The initial account setup, being complete, we have now chosen to use the ‘mute’ feature to make a harsh cropping of the visible accounts.

Why use the ‘mute’ feature that way?

We’re not sure, it’s just an experiment. We have nothing else muted, and we are starting from absolute zero on the account. Basically a blank slate.

Knowing that, consider that we have now muted accounts solely on the basis of ‘followers number’ or ‘following number’.

For ‘followers’ we have placed a hard ceiling at 10K followers. Similar, for ‘following’ we have placed the ceiling at 1K following.

How is ‘mute’ normally used?

This is an assumption but, a pretty safe one: ‘Muting’ is ordinarily used when you don’t like/prefer the content of what you are seeing on the feed. This is a quick way to eliminate the input of something or someone that you don’t want to see. It is seen as less harsh than ‘blocking’.

I feel like using ‘mute’ and ‘block’ in a similar manner is very much the way we would expect average users to behave.

“I don’t like it so I am muting it.” “I don’t like it so I am blocking it.”

Operating in this binary way makes both of these actions very similar, as negative control actions. That sort of reduces the usefulness of these, because they are almost the same thing. So, we end up with two lists that are produced which we can look at later and essentially undo our ‘blocking’ or ‘muting’ actions. Depending on how many are in each list, it might be very labour intensive to review and revise those lists. That’s okay, it seems fairly normal.

Instead we have used ‘mute’ to visually eliminate certain accounts but, it’s not because we don’t like them, or don’t value them.

The decision is taken purely on the metrics that are available. 10K Followers = Mute, 1K Following = Mute.

So, the results are fairly interesting, and not completely unpredictable.

It has taken some time to accomplish this but, not too much.

There actually are not too many accounts which satisfy either condition. In total, the biggest accounts, 10K+ number under 2000. That’s just a guess but, we can easily find an mute them, because they dominate the Trending Tab completely, especially if you look at the profiles section. Then it’s actually a really easy system to implement. The only problem is that I like a lot of those accounts which I have now muted.

The results of this?

We are now seeing exclusively the ‘small-fry’ accounts and we are facilitating interaction with those smaller accounts. It seems pretty good so far, and not entirely unexpected. I actually like it quite a bit better like this. I don’t really believe that anyone can, within reason, follow more that 1K accounts. It’s just not realistic to me, and the accounts that have more than 10K followers completely dominate the entire feed.

All around, this is an interesting experiment, though maybe not completely practical. The only way for this to be better, is if we could have some direct user input into the Mastodon Algorithm. That way we could quickly change those two ‘cut-off’ numbers, or maybe even other things related to the Algorithm.

Nothing wrong with algorithms per se but, I would like to tinker with it at my leisure.

So, back to the subject of commercialization on Mastodon: It’s not such a bad thing. It isn’t banned, it’s actually just a normal usage. Any account holder can basically openly advertise. This is probably the strongest point for Mastodon… period. People can solicit their own work, or even try to sell you something, or promote their own projects and artwork. Self-promotion is the norm. That’s actually a good thing.

There are users who regularly produce and make available high quality content or commentaries. Subsequently their follower counts are increased. This is also normal but, it leads to a narrowing of the input for any algorithm, which just does a simple count of the numbers: replies | boosts | quotes | favourites.

The big fish maintain the advantage, even where quality degrades. It’s simply a numbers game.

As Companies Begin to Enter the Realm,

What tools could the user be offered in order to combat the prevalence and infiltration of advertisement regiments? That’s where we are looking, and this little experiment might be a source of something positive, showing a small light for the way forward for Mastodon.

It is not so easy to find artists that are dedicating their valuable time to focus specifically on the pixelated artform but, I have done my best. There are so many reasons that pixel art is important culturally as well as being historically significant.

While screen sizes and resolutions have increased over time, looking back as far as the year 1970, and then all the way until the early 1990s, pixel art was absolutely necessary. There was no real alternative, the screen resolutions and computing power required us to use imagery which would not overburden the available processors and at the same time it needed to fit within the construct of the screen itself. Today this is almost never a concern except where internet connections are slower, then pixel art still rules the day!

So, even today, there are certain advantages to this ages-old craft. If we look back at the history of pixel art, we can see that it is at least 50 years old as an artform which first grew out of necessity but, is now being maintained diligently by the new generation of artists. The closest relative to modern pixel art, from a standpoint of traditional, non-digit artforms, is probably mosaic tiling.

Pixels Are Still Advantageous.

This is owing to the small size of the images which are produced through this amazing and wonderful method. The file sizes are so small, especially if you also use a specific colour index with, for example, 16 colours only. This means that you can actually have more imagery in the online environment, which in turn means that you can pack even more imagery into your online projects. It’s truly an amazing thing, and the techniques and methods have been handed down through two, or maybe even three generations of pixel art masters.

I, myself, do not believe that this art is actually recognized properly as the true artform that it really is. This is it’s own complete artform with all of its own special toolsets and methodologies which have been honed over time, and through the ages.

Using Modern Screens, You Almost Cannot See The Pixels.

This is because the resolution has become so high that the pixels are so very tiny that you almost cannot distinguish them. This was not always the case, and for many years in the days of early computing, and early video gaming, you could actually see the individual pixels which would be presented on the screen. The colour palettes available were also limited at that time.

This is why I thought it was important to highlight the wonderful pixelated artwork of these Mastodon Artists because they are keeping the tradition of this artform alive. Please enjoy the following links to the profiles of Pixel Artists from all around the Fediverse. While I was searching them out, I was able to find ten but, I am sure there are many more. I felt like it was important to highlight, not based on having the most followed accounts but, based on having obvious pixelated artwork. It needed to be sufficiently pixelated… and it was! Wonderful work!

Very well done everyone!

These link to the media pages:

https://mas.to/@Patrick_Winter/media

https://ohai.social/@amazing_Ekka/media

https://mastodon.art/@dinchenix/media

https://mastodon.world/@Thoogah/media

https://mastodon.art/@ota_pixelart/media

https://mastodon.social/@voidgazerBon/media

https://mastodon.art/@haykira/media

https://socel.net/@ainasge/media

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Kezzo/media

https://mastodon.art/@jmes/media

After seeing the result of some little changes, thanks google, I’m starting to think that it might not be so great, and I’m thinking a hard reversion might be in order. If you think about it, what was everyone doing before social media anyway?

Recent changes are now adding a Sitemap, and an RSS feed to the mix, along with OG-images to boot. The next step would have been to make a way to enter your domain name information so that it would become functional… but wait, why are we trying to align this with the norms required for social media integration anyways? Isn’t that what this project is the antithesis of? Wasn’t that the design direction from the outset?

Don’t get me wrong, you could always easily strap that on afterwards, or we could make it an option but, my feeling is to leave the defaults as just a minimal HTML drafting program. Just output the minimum of formatting and let the user decide the rest. Don’t make them do work to remove what they never wanted/needed.

If ‘discoverability’ is what you are after:

You can still get that yourself, there is no loss here.

I really just liked it better before, and if you wanted an SSG(static site generator) you should just go ahead with setting it up, it has all of those thing handled automatically.

But this program is supposed to be the artistic/fun program.

If everything is going to change (possibly for the better), maybe this program should be on the right side of it, and almost completely ignore the presence of social media. That means we don’t need metadata as the default. For a lot of users, I can see this as being a good choice, and a broad preference. Metadata, sitemaps, and RSS feed are really only for people who want Google to read and index their pages.

If you don’t care about SEO or Indexing, then who cares?

If you are drawing your website for yourself or your own friends, then you don’t need any of that fancy metadata. You can just send the website link to your friends, and that’s how it can work. I feel pretty strongly about this, and unless you are in the business of advertising deliberately, and you want attention from ’the internet-at-large’(strangers), you really don’t want metadata/etc anyhow.

Wish us the best for reverting the changes and taking metadata out of the equation for now.

Looking at setting up parameters for a blogging format.

To me it seems like a fairly good plan to work along through the additions or changes which I would like to make to the ‘HDUB Pixel Art Edition’ program. Then, at the same time I should write a blog post about what is motivating the additional codework and then link to some example page which are made using the new tool. That way it will satisfy several interests simultaneously.

Most likely I can just recycle a lot of the imagery that is directly part of the ‘HDUB Pixel Art Edition’ interface, because that is what I will be talking about anyhow. So, in theory, this could be a pretty good thing to start doing, improving my personal workflow greatly and crossing together all of the necessities of both coding and advertising for this new project at the same time.

This might also help with my own personal motivation, pushing myself to continue to work through whatever new challenges I might face, though, the majority of the most difficult parts of the program are already done.

This is more like the icing on the cake.

The most important decisions about the program, and the most difficult point in the code have been finished for quite some time, and since then I have been trying to ‘zero-in’ on the most crucial additions that can be made to enhance the program for a beginner.

The best thing about this program is that it is a ‘one-stop-shop’ in the sense that you can now save a complete 20 page website as a single zipped package. You even get a sitemap and an RSS feed happening right away, which is crucial for SEO if you want to get picked up on google. Aside from that it is also very important to have the RSS set up so that someone else can have a very lightweight method of following your new posts.

I could make it somewhat tutorial in nature.

This new format could help to give a more interesting, and less ‘dry’ form of insight into how the program is used. That might be helpful for someone who is not an ’exploratory learner’.

As the first order of business, I will draw a little example that will show which button to press when you want to save your entire project. Maybe that will help? Then that way I can also test whether the RSS feed and the sitemap is really working or not.

Wish me luck!

Oh wait! I don’t have a convenient way to link between the pages.

So, I will try to write the few lines of code that will make that happen easily. Maybe that should be the first thing that I draw up as part of this new coding/blogging format? Sure, why not…

Finally I can link the pages to each other.

The only problem now is that there is no way to have a valid sitemap/rss unless I have a way to enter the domain name into the program… where would that even go? There’s no room left in the menu! Maybe I’ll need to fit it into there somewhere.

That’s a job for another day… Right now, I guess they are just there symbolically. They don’t really do anything… BAH!

I suppose, ultimately, I’m going to need to have everything that any other SSG needs as input. I guess I should just try to use that as a model.

Here is the link to the set of pages that I have been trying to get working.

Simple Two Page Project Example with links

Try navigating to https://earlyweblinks.com

This is a wonderful directory showcasing plenty of real websites from all over the internet. I know what you’re thinking and no, these are not all neocities websites, although there seem to be a few. There are, reportedly, more that 12000 websites in this amazing modern internet directory.

When I said modern, I guess I should have rather used the term ‘current’, because there is nothing particularly modern about this website. That’s exactly how I like it. The original spirit of the internet is palpable on this human curated website. I like knowing that real people actually wrote those websites, and I like knowing that the directory itself has also been assembled by an actual human person.

Actual Human Written Websites Should Be Regarded as Premium.

The sad reality is that projects like this one are typically ignored in the mainstream, and rarely get any significant attention. That’s why I’m writing up a little article to tell you all about it.

I really like it, and it’s just sticking in my mind. There is someone out there willing to take their own time to pull together a curated directory for your enjoyment, and I just think that’s a noble public service. You can see from the comments that the response, even though modest in number, is overwhelmingly positive.

Everybody loves this website. A lot of that love is because we know it’s pointing us to real website made by real people. It’s very hard to compete against that in my books, especially when you see how fake everything has become. We’re in a big commercialized mess of algorithm that the little guy can hardly break through.

Most small personal website never see the light of day. Someone just writes it for their own satisfaction, and I just think that’s great! If there was some way to connect all of that and chalk it up into some sort of mish-mashed system, just to get some interactivity through that, I think we’d be on the right track.

Neocities only has a system to track it’s own subdomain sites.

That’s where this thing is different in a positive way. It’s not only part of one thing. We can see websites from anywhere, and they are all listed here, curated on the basis that they are written by actual human people.

To me, that’s a really good thing, and a thing worth checking out.

Give it a whirl, maybe have a look at the ‘Site of the Week’, or get crazy and try the ‘Random Site’ button.

Best wishes, happy surfing… Where has this been?

https://earlyweblinks.com

This article posted on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@dckim/116751670243716402

I guess I am a bit of a stickler but, I still can’t seem to get everything that I want… I tried switching to another theme ‘blowfish’ then I gave up because I felt like that’s too complicated or almost the same as starting the whole process over from scratch.

Also, if you are reading this and thinking ‘AI should not be used for this’… yeah, I used it. Still super intensely difficult. It helped to get it running but, fine tuning is out the window. I don’t care to bother with ’learning correctly’ or any such nonsense. I need things to be basically automatic. I hate coding. I hate reading manuals. And I don’t think that’s strange. It’s probably about average for any person.

Other than being totally impossible, it’s working out pretty good. My posts are getting indexed on Google within only a few hours, so that’s a good sign in my books. So, I think if I just keep my expectations a lot lower and try to ease into the flow of this more subtly, maybe that will be for the best.

I will have to do some reading somewhere along the line but, after working so many hard hours working towards writing a vanilla js program (HDUB Pixel Art Edition), don’t blame me for trying to cheat in every possible way. I just hate coding so much right now. I find it so boring and I am assuming that if I know my own code well enough, I should be able to knock out a few freebies with AI. I know a lot of people are against that, especially on Mastodon. I have a bit of an explanation for that seemingly predominant view…

Why does Mastodon seem to frown upon the use of AI?

To me this seems like the subject of a whole new post but, I’ve already started rambling on through this one. So, allow me to continue…

Mastodon is a high concentration of technical experts and programmers. I assume the majority of those people are working their field, and are somewhere along the leading-edge, or working on something competitive or somewhat different or new. To me there isn’t much of a mystery when we see that some expert company or notable person uses AI and fails. The story then goes viral on Mastodon and we all assume that AI is useless and all who use it should be shunned from society.

But, there is more than one story here.

There are the experts, and then there are the non-experts.

When I say non-experts, assume I am including people who couldn’t even touch any kind of code before, and were never capable of doing certain things with the computer. Whether because of lack of effort, ability, or just a completely different career-path, they have no ability with computers. Or like myself, they have completely ignored it, and find it excruciatingly boring.

No matter how ‘useless’ anyone says AI is, we must admit, at the low end we see an uptick in the base capability. There are people who before couldn’t even touch the computer, and now have a very good chance of being able to get some functionality happening.

For the experts who are declaring AI to be completely useless, abhorrent, etc, they are also correct. From the expert perspective you are correct, this tool does nothing for you. You are working on the leading-edge, perhaps making something new, and probably using a method that no one else is using. AI does nothing for the leading-edge where innovative/non-standard codework is necessary.

For someone who is not an expert, they couldn’t even do anything before this.

So, I guess what I am saying here is, why would anyone forbiddingly suggest that a non-expert person should, for some reason, not use AI, and should instead go straight into abusive self-study of something that could probably be done in seconds if you just ask. I think that it’s pretty safe to say that if you could determine how to do something by reading a giant book about a programming language, you probably don’t have to read the book at all. The AI already read it and several others. None of the information in that book is new. It’s all old. Nothing about the code or computer setup that a non-expert is trying to have is new.

They are just trying to get the same things that have been lorded over them this whole time.

Don’t begrudge the baseline for the little guy.

https://mastodon.social/@dckim/116750171866497347

The other defaults that we have will give fairly good metadata on each page, that way you can link it immediately through social media, and hopefully the previews will look 100% top-notch, just how you designed it. Just make sure that you use the load button to get your custom OG-image. Otherwise you could switch it out after the fact but, it’s much easier to do it in the program because then when you save the project (using ’s’) you will have that OG-image still there later…

Middle mouse scroll

This is now the default mouse behaviour in the outgoing pages. It can be changed if you don’t prefer it. It’s set in the footer, which can be changed on a per-page basis. So, all of the pages can be very unique but, I wanted to make sure that the initial default setup was a very common one. It needs to be something that everyone’s going to understand and hopefully you agree, AND I think that it covers off something that most people might find difficult to implement on their own. This way it’s just always there, and the outgoing webpages feel almost identical to how it is while you are working the program.

I feel like these are pretty good defaults

I’m not sure if there are any other good defaults that I can set up so that it’s even easier and a better fit for what people would like to see. This isn’t intended to be a complete replacement or even a competitor to standard SSgs(static site generators). Those are great, they do a wonderful job. It’s just that it’s very restrictive, and everything is in completely defined boxes. So, this is actually totally different from that, you can put the boxes wherever you want, and you can even write your own code into it if you know how.

There is a lot more freedom here

With more freedom, you might find that it’s not as streamlined as Hugo, for example. But, then, there is no real comparison between those two things. Hugo doesn’t end up with a whole lot of wiggle room in the formats. They’re pretty much button-down and set. That’s exactly what you want for a standard blog/news style format, and you-know, all of the other stuff that it does, it’s Great.

Just throwing some images into the page in a highly graphical composition, that’s where we are at with this program.

Looking ahead

The current stage of the program is pretty good, and of course next I will need to test it out. The capability to save a single file vanilla program still remains. The versatility hasn’t been reduced. There is a lot to try in this program. The goal, initially wasn’t to make an ’expert-only’ style program but, instead to make something that was easy to use and ‘for-everyone’. Basically that is all accomplished in the defaults. Having effective and easy default settings is what makes the difference between an ’experts-only’ and a ‘for-everyone’ program. Most of those things are already on board with the program. The majority of the defaults are good but, we haven’t reduced the possible specificity of the configuration to the point that you cannot anymore have a near full control.

Anyone who knows a little bit of HTML CSS and Javascript will have an absolute field-day on this program.

Anything you know will have a ten-fold effect within the program context.

Listing them

• a quick way to make up a link to one of the twenty pages(click a button to input the link), probably just use the standardized button maker already included in the program
• make up some special functions to give better ’end-points’ for the user to be able to interact with the program code and potentially code their own functions for the program and extend the program that way, expand on that thought…

Write up some good user accessible functions

For an hobby Javascript efficianado to be able to interact with the program a little bit better, I should write up some custom ’end-points’ that will make interacting with the program code more fun, and a lot simpler. You would have thought I would have done that earlier for myself but, I wasn’t sure what the final product was going to be. So, I’m going to try to think of some very basic ones to help people to extend the program themselves.

It’s a working program, you can absolutely make a functional artistic/hobby website with it. Even so, it’s basically experimental at this point, and serves as a proof of the concept. HTML can be treated graphically, and it’s actually very nice to use that way.

If you have some comments, please go ahead and drop me a line on mastodon.

Yes this is now the default, and it feels a lot more like any other static site generator with respect of that. We are now getting a generated index.html, and most of the metadata is taken care of for our pages. Keep in mind, however, that you don’t need to stop at 20 pages. The page number is not a limit, it is just the number of pages that you can save in a single project. You can always have multiple projects and therefore extend the website through that method. The only thing left that I would like to still add is a way to make easy links between the pages but, this is a pretty solid advancement for a couple of days work (google really helped). I really hate writing computer code, and there is absolutely nothing ‘cutting-edge’ about this, so I went right to the google prompt and tried whether it could just fix up some of the things I wanted to add. Of course, I needed to clip it in manually but, it seemed to work very easily this time. No major problems, didn’t break any of the code (that I know of… yet)

I put some other stuff in there as default

Just like I mentioned in a previous post, I made a default that will basically make sure that the webpages will have the ‘middle-mouse-pan-action’ just like how the program does it. So, it brings everything together very nicely now.

The last thing to do today is to finish a post for the blog

What’s the point of making a significant change to the program if I don’t tell anyone about it? Let me know if you found this, you can drop me a line somewhere on Mastodon, and tell me what you think of the project thus far. It’s not a commercial project, and it’s fairly simple to use. There is documentation. The main page gives the links to the documentation and the program.

Save the program with CTRL + C

Yes, the whole program can be saved as a single vanilla file directly in the browser. The only other thing that I can think of that I have missed is that we can’t actually set the location metadata yet, so everyone will think you are all in Toronto Canada when you save your website.

It would be easier if I just change it, either that or you could move to Canada. (that was a joke… or was it?)

Sup everybody, welcome to this new blog. It’s basically a casual way for me to post some articles and try to get feedback, or maybe even just post the latest update news for the website.

This one is for HDUB Pixel Art Edition, which is basically the main program that has been produced by the project thus far. The stage we are at: We have a fully functional proof of concept, demostrating that HTML design can be treated exactly like all other 2D graphical art programs. It’s way more fun that way, and you can so much more control that with other methods. SSG(static site generators) are sort of boring to use, and after setting it up for this blog, and for the HDUB documentation (dckim.org), I am starting to think… “Yeah, Pixel Art Edition is actually a fun program to use!”

Static Site Generators

These are actually very boring to use. They have their strong points, when you want everything to be very regimented but, the drawback is when you want to put in some of your own custom buttons… and then it’s like “How can I even do that here?”

I’m not even sure it’s possible, and if it is, it’s hardly worth it. SSG is great for very straight forward News/Blog/Etc websites, 100% the best.

HDUB Potential Upgrades: “How about saving 20 pages at once?”

I’m thinking about it, and have been for a few weeks while I haven’t touched the code for a while. Now I am thinking about adding in the last few ‘kickers’ just to make sure this is a top class, untouchable gem of a program.

On the table, I have a few ideas. How about instead of saving only one webpage in a ‘zipped’ format, we save all twenty (20) levels at once? To me this seems like a ’no-brainer’, of course do it. Then the other thing that I have been thinking of is to make the first level become an index pointing to the other 19 pages… So it will just have some default links to all other pages, maybe itself too. That way the user has all of that default setup immediately.

That’s mainly what I’m looking at, and then maybe making the default footer give a ‘middle mouse scroll’ feature to the pages. So, because you can customize the ‘footer’ of the page, you can always change this, if you prefered the ordinary scroll.

That would really change the whole feeling of your pages.

Middle Mouse Scrolling

This would give you a really strong ‘world-building’ feeling to your webpage drawing experience, and then the viewer of the webpage would have the very same feeling while they navigate around your artwork in the pages. So, what I am really looking for here is to install some pop-culture defaults, which everyone would instant love. So, the above proposed changes are strong candidates.

Respond to this blog on Mastodon.social using @dckim

Or use the post of this blog article directly to reply.

Otherwise, here is a link to the mastodon post that I made with this blog article:
https://mastodon.social/@dckim/116711573527298691

Taste of North York isn’t just at Mel Lastman Square.

The festivities are actually going on all over the area, and are promoting all of the amazing restaurants that are available in this wonderful region of Toronto.

While I was walking through the square today, it didn’t look like there were any specifically Halal food setups but, I am sure there are some in there somewhere. If you aren’t finding anything Halal, you can always go for the vegetarian options in the square. Always remember, when in doubt, just ask what the ingredients are, and maybe, just maybe, bring your own spoon.

The spoon is just in case there are some novelty iced-cream flavours available which come in small amounts but are all on a single order. I have no evidence that this is not the case.

Various Cultural Treats will be showcased.

That is an absolute certainty but, we can only truly confirm the state of affairs by investigating the situation manually. There may be cakes, and other confections, having various types and densities. It is entirely possible that there might be specialty cookies present within the festive areas.

Here are some places to get Halal food.

• Shawarma MAX, always a good choice, always Halal
• Villa Madina, always Halal, super good food
• There’s actually so many good places that are always 100% Halal, I don’t know anymore why I started a list but, there is no reason to abandon the list and then reformat this section because it’s just a casual blogging style of writing over here at DCKIM toronto tech blog.

Best wishes to everyone who is enjoying this festival. Always consider how fortunate you are that you have been blessed with safety and other wonderful things which you cannot provide for yourself but, only can be provided for us all from the creator of all things, Allah(SWT).

Here is the link to the mastodon posting of this article:

https://mastodon.social/@dckim/116700022516890734

Maybe when I get around to it, I will install the big paper sign again? Hey, why not. It got some attention last fall, and now HDUB Pixel Art Edition is hitting the streets.

I can hardly believe that last years sign stayed up on that community sign-board for as long as it did. For a simple paper sign made out of bristol-board, four months is a long long time. Every time it rained, I wasn’t expecting it to make it through the week. I actually made three more which all were ripped off by wind and rain. The only one that lasted was the first one that I placed near the Famous Owls Meat Shop. I have no idea why it lasted, maybe it’s not a very windy location. Some-how, some-way, it stayed up on that post for such a long time.

I don’t know when it actually got torn off. Some time through the snowy brutally cold winter, that’s my guess. Good thing I had a backup set of letters, so making up the new signage wasn’t too much work. I just need to paint up a little more to finish it out: HTML Hobby (above) and Craft HTML (below). Hopefully it will be similar to the little single page flyer design. I really like the flyer.

HDUB Pixel Art Edition is out already

In reality I haven’t touched the code in a few weeks but, maybe there are a few last tricks to be pulled to make this thing even a little bit hotter. Still, from what I am seeing, there is nothing even remotely similar for making Artistic HTML websites. Everything seems to be geared towards Static Site Generators (SSGs) like this one (HUGO). Those are great for blogs and news websites but, for more Artistic stuff, you need more freedom, and it has to be more about the graphics than the text. You need more control over the positions of your imagery so that you can have the freedom to overlap components and design the way that you decide.

That’s what HDUB is about, freedom. It’s main focus is making it easy by letting you treat the HTML pages in the same way that you would treat any artistic canvas.

The absolute best thing about HDUB as a piece of software is that it works completely offline, and your intellectual property and artworks remain completely yours. You don’t need to sign-in or sign-up to use it. Just download the little file (~1.5mb) and the program is yours forever.

This one doesn’t do anything funny like updating itself etc. and it doesn’t have anything built in to track you or send any of your data etc. to a company. That’s because HDUB isn’t even a company, and there is no corporation which has control over it. It’s just a clean piece of Canadian Software which works for the user.

I’m still working on advertising.

You might find it surprising that advertising and gaining any measure of visibility is the greatest challenge for such a small project as DCKIM. It’s hard to get any attention at all but, this tiny, microscopic little project has been seen by some legendary professionals in the software and technology industry.

The first top expert who made mention of the project was a guy named Glyph. If you haven’t heard of him, you maybe also haven’t heard of the Python programming language. Everyone who knows Python, almost certainly has heard of him because he is an early ‘Python Pioneer’ known mostly for his vital contribution, namely ‘Twisted Python Framework’. This guy is huge. He link ‘dckim.com’ in a post back in late October 2025.

Soldier of FORTRAN (phil young), the mainframe computer security expert boosted this site. Unreal.

The next top expert, an absolute legend in his field, who literally invented the ‘pen-test’… and I can’t even explain how this ever happened, or how he even found my posts, then boosted my french language post, not only once but, twice within a 72 hour period. I thanked him after the first re-post, and he responded by posting it again.

That I could hardly even believe, and I just thought to myself ‘This has to be the absolute biggest moment for the project’.

Nothing can really be bigger than that for such a small project like this… It just doesn’t get bigger than this.

https://mastodon.social/@dckim/116478303440989514

Don’t worry Toronto, I got this

I’ve been pumping out ads on Mastodon since last August. It’s the only service that doesn’t ban all advertisement. Every other social media thing requires payment for any advertisement or they ban you for life. Not so with Mastodon, it’s free and it’s open, and it’s packed with tonnes of experts across all sorts of interesting fields.

It still has that ‘small-town’ atmosphere, and where else could you casually correspond with multiple astrophysicists or even astronomers? or even… you name it, that’s where the pros are hanging out.

Here is the mastodon posting URL link:

https://mastodon.social/@dckim/116695201761042361