🎃 Night before IndieWebCamp Berlin! Participants are (hopefully, mostly) all tucked into their beds, dreaming of what wonderful things they can brainstorm for their personal sites Saturday, and #HackTheirPlanet on Sunday.
Want to keep up with #IndieWebCamp #Berlin participants?
Follow their feeds and a Bluesky starter pack (happy to include more for any other formats, protocols, or platforms)
* https://indieweb.org/2025/Berlin#Feeds_Lists_Starter_Packs_Oh_My
We’ll add more as folks sign-in at the camp!
This is post 14 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #IndieWeb #Blogtober #IndieWebMovieClub #HackThePlanet 📟
← https://tantek.com/2025/303/t1/october-blogging-challenges
→ 🔮
October is almost over! For all us procrastinators, still time to write a post or two to participate in #October blogging challenges like:
#Blogtober
#IndieWebMovieClub on #Hackers
#Inktober
#Mathober
#WeirdWebOctober
+ coding challenges:
#Hacktoberfest — https://blog.holopin.io/posts/hacktoberfest-2025
Many more at:
* https://indieweb.org/October
* https://indieweb.org/blog_carnival
🎃 And tomorrow is #Halloween so consider a holiday theme for your site as well! See #IndieWeb examples for inspiration:
* https://indieweb.org/Halloween
Last but not least, perhaps we’ll see some of you at #IndieWebCamp Berlin this weekend!
* https://indieweb.org/2025/Berlin
This is post 13 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2025/182/t1/movie-club-tomorrowland-submissions
→ https://tantek.com/2025/304/t1/night-before-indiewebcamp-berlin
… speaking of badges (Wikipedia User: 20 year editor badge in my previous post) …
I got the #Hacktoberfest 2025: Level 0 Registered badge from Hacktoberfest @hacktoberfest @digitalocean! https://www.holopin.io/hacktoberfest2025/userbadge/cmhas5f6h003bje041kcld1is via @holopin_
Saturday was my 20th #Wikipedia editing anniversary.
I have created:
* over 25 content articles (that have survived), averaging just over 1 per year
* over 100 redirects to make it easier to find pages, and to find topics which are only documented as sections of existing pages.
This year I’ve created five content articles (so far). Most recently:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governors_Public_Health_Alliance
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaptureTok
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Public_Health_Collaborative
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Health_Alliance
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_California
I have had quite the range of experiences editing and creating articles.
Many of my contributions to pages eventually disappeared after iterative edits or outright rewrites. I have seen repetitive wiki edits, repeatedly undoing changes made.
I have also seen others build on my edits, sometimes taking a correction I made and expanding upon it, with more citations, more details, or both.
Over time I learned various techniques, or patterns for editing, especially for creating new pages, to increase their chances of survival, while also discouraging vandalism or other attacks. I have found ways of writing that somehow get other editors to show up and help defend articles.
If I could summarize it in a few words, I'd say aim for short, boring, and factual content (with high-quality citations). New articles work best when they’re similar to and based on existing well-established articles, no matter how small.
I have learned that it is possible to defend the accuracy of an article even if you are outnumbered, by accurately documenting erroneous additions or changes on the article’s :Talk page, along with calm and thorough refutation of those erroneous additions. Doing so makes it much easier to revert any similar changes, and point to the pre-existing analysis on the :Talk page to discourage repetitive edits.
Wikipedia has a fascinating set of rules, guidelines, and mechanisms for working in the open, and especially in the context of attacks by all sorts of bad actors, whether griefers, or politicians and businesses scrubbing (or self-promoting) their image.
I found this article on Wikipedia’s systems and their resilience particularly inspiring:
* https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales
I believe every open source project and open standards organization can learn from how Wikipedia works and thrives, especially in the face of antagonists large and small. I certainly have.
If you do not have a Wikipedia account, I recommend creating one and using it to edit so you too can learn firsthand. Make an account, then browse your areas of interest or expertise to see if you can find pages to improve. Be bold.
I was proud to add the 20 year editor badge to my User page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:User_Twenty_Year_Society
It’s never too late to start.
Numerous #w3cTPAC breakout sessions have been proposed.
* https://github.com/w3c/tpac2025-breakouts/issues/?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20sort%3Acreated-asc
If you plan to participate in TPAC breakouts, whether in-person or remote, take a look and give the ones that look interesting to you thumbs-up 👍, heart ❤️, or rocket 🚀 reactions.
For more information about TPAC 2025 Breakout sessions and how they work, see:
* https://github.com/w3c/tpac2025-breakouts
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Happy #8bitday yesterday! It was the 256th day of the year.
See last year’s post for why the 256th day is 8-Bit Day: https://tantek.com/2024/256/t1/happy-8bitday-binary-byte
Since last year, the related Wikipedia article on “Programmer’s Day” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_Day) was updated to finally acknowledge worldwide observation of the day.
This year, inspired by the old 5k (bytes) competition (https://the5k.org/about.php), I suggested to a few friends that it may be possible to build an entire website where each resource fits into at most 8-bits worth of bytes. 255 bytes maximum size HTML, and maximum size of any linked external stylesheet, image, or even script file.
Constraints are key to good, creative, and often innovative design.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/06/design-constraints-challenges-opportunities-practical-strategies/
I have some ideas for how to create meaningful HTML documents in ≤ 255 bytes. I also have some experience with creating interesting style sheets under similar constraints with the invention of TSS (Tweet Style Sheets or Text Style Sheets) at the 2010 Twitter Annotations Hackfest (#tanhf). TSS links and details on https://indieweb.org/TSS
Intuitively I think a home page ≤255 bytes may be the most challenging, like displaying and linking to a stream of posts, in addition to basic about info. Post permalinks could display short notes (like old 140 character posts), requiring pagination to view anything longer. Images would be another interesting challenge, since even a 32x32 black & white (1-bit) icon would already be 128 bytes. What can fit into a 255 byte PNG or JPEG?, nevermind SVG, which will be much harder than HTML due to its much longer tags and attributes.
The archived FAQ for the5k competition is a good start for answering various questions about how to build an "8-bit" website: https://web.archive.org/web/20050310075803/http://www.the5k.org:80/2001faq.asp
I would add to that proper use of progressive enhancement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement), that is, all the content on a page is viewable, and all links, buttons, forms etc. work without loading any scripts.
Besides the5k.org, have there been any similar challenges or competitions for 1k bytes, or 512 bytes? Why did Stewart pick 5k bytes instead of something smaller?
Update:
8-bit examples — HTML, CSS, JS files all ≤255 bytes
* https://tantek.com/8bit.html HTML+CSS
* https://jamesg.blog/8bit HTML+CSS
* https://tilde.club/~artlung/miniclock/ HTML+CSS+JS
* https://villepreux.net/8bits/ HTML+CSS+JS
* https://pcarrier.com/smol valid HTML!
* https://pcarrier.com/packed HTML (with inline CSS+JS)
* https://lab.lunaseeker.com/tests/256bytes.html valid HTML+CSS!
* https://256-byte-site.netlify.app/ valid & accessible HTML+CSS+SVG+WebP!!!
* ... who will be next?
Responses:
* 2025-258 https://jamesg.blog/2025/09/15/a-255-byte-web-page
* 2025-259 https://indieweb.social/@villapirorum/115213910454844925 and blog post https://villepreux.net/blog/myweb/8bit-day/
* 2025-260 https://nothing.pcarrier.com/posts/255/
* 2025-264 https://front-end.social/@AmeliaBR/115245263894149770
