About This Site

The bitroast.us and bi6.us were launched in the mid-2000s to hold a small collection of online web development tools. Towards the end of 2010, these tools (but not the domain or the bitroast brand) were sold to a larger business. The terms of the sale stipulated the version of the tools that were sold could not be published on bitroast.us for free (and we would have had to collect a license to continue offering them as commercial products.) There was, however, no stipulation that we couldn't build new versions of the same tools. And as long as we changed the names of the tools, we could keep the bitroast name.

After 15 years, we finally cleared our schedule of competing commitments and are starting to deploy new tools. One tool we're re-building is a QR-Code based shortener / redirector which rewards upper case letters and short URLs. This is why we've moved all our content from bitroast.us to bi6.us, it saves us 5 characters in the shortened URL.

The first tool we're building is the Nano-Blog utility. It generates a series of static pages with "micro-blog-esque" posts in the mode of bluesky, mastadon or twitter. It also generates site-wide and per-topic RSS feeds. We believe this is less addictive than typical social media tools. It's intended to be used by individuals or small teams to publish content to their own web sites with a leisurely cadence. You can't subscribe to specific users and there is no built-in ability to comment on posts. It's designed more for "screaming into the void" than "screaming at each other." But each post has a permalink, so if you really wanted to, you could create a separate site which aggregated feeds and allowed comments.

Design Notes

It is no secret I am a fan of the old-school serial terminal. I grew up writing software on VT100's and 3270's. I still have a VT330 connected to my Linux system at home for when I can't be bothered to SSH into it. If you are viewing this page from a modern graphical browser, it is intended to look as if it's displayed on a VT340.

We chose somewhat narrow paragraphs because our eyes are getting old and it's harder for at least one of us to follow along on long lines. It might also look better on thin mobile devices. We chose justified text because we include at least one fan of old paperbacks where this was the norm. For the curious, the 1960 edition of Hilton's Lost Horizon [LOST] and the 1970, 5th printing of James Blish's Spock Must Die! [SPOCK] were used as exemplars of decent paperbacks to emulate.

[ Don't worry, people with a good sense of design have already told me I am insane for liking this. Also people with no sense of design. I make no apologies and offer few explanations. —msh ]

If you have javascript enabled and you type "trade" into the browser while viewing this site, we will set a session-only, secure, same-site cookie named "trade". If this cookie is set to "true", then the width of the page is extended to include per-line content approximately similar to what you would see in a trade paperback. This obviously sets a cookie, so you should not type "t-r-a-d-e" unless you want cookies. Typing "trade" a second time toggles the behavior.

The HTML and CSS on this site were hand crafted after frustrating experiences with popular web frameworks. It is true we eschew Bootstrap, Tailwind, et cetera. We do not eschew them for all projects and suggest you evaluate them for yourself. Our requirements are not your requirements. Ditto for Angular, React, et cetera. This is a simple static HTML page. It doesn't need to use every feature supported by the modern web to render text.

The font I'm using is VT220 mod [VT220MOD] which is a modified version of Robert Kiraly's VT220 font [VT220]. Earlier versions of this site used placeholder text from Hipster-Ipsum [HIPSTER] and placeholder images from PlaceCats.Com [PLACECATS]. Each of these resources is license free as far as I can tell.

Contact

Feel free to contact us about issues related to the site and its content at [email protected]. Do not use this email alias for unsolicited commercial email.

License and Copyright

Original content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The VT200 mod typeface is used according to its license as described above.

References

LOST: Hilton's Lost Horizon
https://search.worldcat.org/title/9821042
SPOCK: James Blish's Spock Must Die!
https://search.worldcat.org/title/271844659
VT220MOD: The font I'm using...
https://github.com/lalo/VT220-mod-font
VT220: ...a modified version of...
http://christfollower.me/misc/glasstty/index.html
HIPSTER: Hipster-Ipsum
https://hipsum.co/
PLACECATS: PlaceCats.Com
https://placecats.com/