Andrew andrew-t

Recently @alexparsons asked Democracy Club what the earliest local authority website was. Nobody knew, but we had fun looking at pages from 1996.

I pulled up my old IPv4 reverse DNS scan of .gov.uk domains, and the official list of .gov.uk domains, then queried the internet archive for each one.

The list below is every UK Government website sorted by the first time the Internet Archive saved a copy.

The links go to the archived version of the site at that time. Expect to get nostalgic. - @jonty

Archive date	Domain

These instructions are for implementing HTTPS on a NFSN-hosted static site using a certificate from Let's Encrypt. The certificate is generated manually on a separate computer.

Start off by installing the letsencrypt client. This requires sudo privileges and will install a bunch of packages:

% curl -O https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
% chmod +x ./certbot-auto
% ./certbot-auto

Generate the certificate. This will require you to publish some challenge responses on NFSN. I find it easiest to use tmux with letsencrypt running in one window and an SSH session to NFSN in another:

What forces layout / reflow

All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout*. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.

Generally, all APIs that synchronously provide layout metrics will trigger forced reflow / layout. Read on for additional cases and details.

Element APIs

Getting box metrics

elem.offsetLeft, elem.offsetTop, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight, elem.offsetParent

	int[][] result;
	float t, c;

	float ease(float p) {
	return 3pp - 2pp*p;
	}

	float ease(float p, float g) {
	if (p < 0.5)
	return 0.5 * pow(2*p, g);

	<script>
	// A minimal polyfill for copying text to clipboard that works most of the time in most capable browsers.
	// Note that:
	// - You may not need this. `navigator.clipboard.writeText()` works directly in all modern browsers as of 2020.
	// - In Edge, this may call `resolve()` even if copying failed.
	// - In Safari, this may fail if there is nothing selected on the page.
	// See https://github.com/lgarron/clipboard-polyfill for a more robust solution.
	//
	// License for this Gist: public domain / Unlicense
	function writeText(str) {

	# Spigot algorithm using Gosper's series for pi
	# ref: section 6 of http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/spigot.pdf

	from itertools import count
	def div(a,b):
	return int(a/b)
	# compose two 2x2 matrices
	def comp(a,b):
	q,r,s,t = a
	u,v,w,x = b

	{
	"0": "-----",
	"1": ".----",
	"2": "..---",
	"3": "...--",
	"4": "....-",
	"5": ".....",
	"6": "-....",
	"7": "--...",
	"8": "---..",

	<!--
	1. Download the Android Jelly Bean fonts and the Symbola font:
	https://www.dropbox.com/s/tvtzcnzkvbe0nrt/jelly-bean-fonts.zip
	http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola707.zip

	2. unzip the files and put AndroidEmoji.ttf and Symbola.ttf (and any of the other fonts that strike your fancy)
	in your ~/.fonts/ directory

	3. run `fc-cache -f`. You can check to make sure the new fonts
	were installed with `fc-list`. You'll probably want to grep the copious output for Symbola or Emoji

	import java.util.*;
	import java.io.*;
	import java.security.*;

	public class ChangePassword
	{
	private final static JKS j = new JKS();

	public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
	{

	<html>
	<head>
	<script src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.1.min.js'></script>
	</head>

	<body>
	<h2>Naive canvas</h2>
	<canvas id="naive" width="400" height="50"></canvas>

	<h2>High-def Canvas</h2>