Not retro enough...
Since beginning to drive this site with bashblog, I have allowed a minor bit of bloat to creep back in. I do drive the site with a bit of css, but I have tried to keep the design fairly simply despite this so that the site renders perfectly fine using any low-powered (and even text-only) web browser.
A couple of features require the user to allow JavaScript. For a connection to Discord, this is fine. It's a completely optional part of the site, and not in active use, so if you don't have JavaScript, no biggie. You're not really missing anything. But even though they are rarely used, I absolutely have to allow comments. Unless I go back to self-hosting (which is actually feasible again via Cloudflare), the only way to allow them was to connect to Disqus, which also requires JavaScript. This is not ideal, and I may be able to hack together a small bit of php to enable comments if I go back to self-hosting, but because comments rarely get used, I am not sure it is worth the effort of seeing them as more than an optional part of the site.
Also, there's the Feedburner version of my feed, which is again optional, and only enabled for the person or two who were using it to follow me. lol. The second link takes you to the actual feed. ;)
So, if you're able to comment (if not, feel free to email me at wintermute @ my domain), what do you think? Should I forgo the nicities and strip away the optional bloat? Should I leave it as-is, because it doesn't impede anyone's ability to follow the site?
As an aside, this post was partly inspired by one about rediscovering the small web. I strongly suggest you go read that.
Payphone
Some time ago, I purchaced a refurbished payphone online. I bought it unprogrammed, as I wasn't sure how I wanted to set it up, but had some issues getting it to keep some of my settings. I had plugged the internal battery in, and had followed all the instructions. Yet my changes to change collection never seemed to last. Well, recently I also discovered that the phone wasn't working at all. I opened the phone and removed the battery and tested it, and it was dead. So I thought I'd take the board out and see if I could bypass it coin collection completely, and I discovered a second battery on the back of the board. So I did a little more digging, and discovered the first battery apparently provided power to the relay, and the one I discovered powers the chip which saves the setting. I tested it, and the voltage measured a bit low as well. Replacement batteries ordered, so I should finally be able to set the phone the way I'd like it set.
In the process, I also discovered a blog post about fixing a Protel payphone. It appears to be more-or-less the same phone as I have, and has a lot of interesting information that I hadn't run across before. Worth checking out if you're interested in such things at all.
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