blackhole://nilFM

you are here

domain

I picked this domain back in 2013 and have stuck with it ever since. It was originally solely a place to host my mixes -- hence the name, resembling a radio station -- but organically evolved over time into what you see here.

The current meaning of the domain name is:

empty Formless Machine, Computing Carefully

server

This site currently runs on a void virtual machine hosted by Upcloud and running on renewable energy. It serves as a microcosm of lightcrystal.systems. The basic schema is a customized void image on a small VM, encrypted block storage, and modular services loaded from the block storage.

the design

The design of the website itself is deliberately spartan according to my principles. That means no Javascript, no web fonts, and no on-demand content generation. There are also no cookies or tracking of any kind. I make use of plenty of CSS3 in the layout and styling of this site, but it still functions perfectly with CSS disabled. This, as well as accessibility for the blind, are the result of a simple semantically consistent HTML structure.

Another consideration is accessibility over poor internet connections. All images are either hand-optimized (background/banner images and SVG icons) or optimized by resizing and dithering (thumbnails). This, combined with the aforementioned points, leads to even the heaviest pages on the site having low payload size and quick load times.

I encourage other web developers and designers to follow this approach whenever possible, or only use Javascript and remote content when absolutely necessary, as this leads to a more accessible and less wasteful internet.

Light Crystal Forge runs on Forgejo: a user-friendly code forge in the true spirit of decentralized source control, powered by Go and usable (if ugly) without Javascript and modern CSS.

The black hole cafe is a honk instance; honk is a minimal and opinionated ActivityPub server. It follows a progressive enhancement/graceful degredation design philosophy, with basic functionality being usable without Javascript or even from a text-based web browser.

Grimoire is a throwback to classic web services and dead simple, making a single extra request per stream per page load to probe its liveness and using semantic markup along with modern CSS to show that status.