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blog.lacour.me

72 points by laCour 10 years ago · 39 comments

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will_hughes 10 years ago

The domain 'blog.lacour.me' doesn't resolve for me:

Your name servers seem to be ns[1-5].he.net, and ns1.he.net doesn't know what blog.lacour.me is:

  > blog.lacour.me  
  Server:  ns1.he.net  
  Address:  216.218.130.2

  *** No address (A) records available for blog.lacour.me
  • jtokoph 10 years ago

    Some of comcast's DNS resolvers must be confused. I get different results each time I make a query:

        $ dig @75.75.75.75  blog.lacour.me
        QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
        {{ no answer }}
    
    
        $ dig @75.75.75.75  blog.lacour.me
        QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
        blog.lacour.me.		75275	IN	CNAME	silvrback.herokuapp.com.
        silvrback.herokuapp.com. 156	IN	CNAME	us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com.
        us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com. 30 IN	A	23.23.208.103
  • tombrossman 10 years ago

    It's not using an A record, it's using a CNAME:

      host blog.lacour.me
      blog.lacour.me is an alias for silvrback.herokuapp.com.
      silvrback.herokuapp.com is an alias for us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com.
      us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com has address 54.83.3.141
    • VeilEm 10 years ago

      The CNAME doesn't resolve for me either. I can't see whatever this is.

wallacoloo 10 years ago

What ever happened to consistent, cross-application look-and-feel? I don't want each application defining its own style which clashes with every other application. We already have things like Qt and GTK themes for the desktop, but the web is just a mess in that regard. I really hope to see some eventual solution.

Mozilla's "Reader View" is a fantastic step towards establishing a consistent (and user-configurable) look-and-feel across the web. But its domain is still very narrow and wouldn't apply to Slack, unfortunately. Yet it's the only product I know of that's even working towards this kind of goal.

  • droelf 10 years ago

    Check this afternoon project: https://github.com/wolfv/GtkOnline

    That could be a future GTK browser :) dynamically downloads a glade ui file and python + CSS scripts to bring the web to GTK.

  • Nickoladze 10 years ago

    That's why I use Slack's IRC gateway. Just use your favorite IRC client.

  • seanwilson 10 years ago

    It's just too impractical get every developer who also support multiple platforms to all agree to use exactly the same look and feel. There's similarities to getting everyone to use the same programming language.

    • noir_lord 10 years ago

      Nor would I want it anyway, I think the cognitive overhead of dealing with multiple different interfaces is offset against the fact that people can create new interfaces and solutions, imo that is better than a "one size fits none" approach.

  • madeofpalk 10 years ago

    Mozilla's 'Reader View' isn't consistent with the OS X look-and-feel on my Mac, but that's OK.

    • wallacoloo 10 years ago

      Yeah, it's not consistent with the system's look-and-feel, unfortunately. But it is at least consistent across websites, which is a start. And technically, it shouldn't be hard to add support for system themes - Firefox can already derive default background/foreground/text/link colors from GTK & apply those to webpages; it's just currently a useless feature since most all websites override the defaults completely, or worse, only partially.

nodesocket 10 years ago

Really nice hack. Unrelated, by I checked out your startup https://hund.io. My question is... Why not just use https://StatusPage.io? They are launched, funded, refined, and the de-facto standard. What is your value prop?

  • rickycook 10 years ago

    status page pricing is kind of ridiculous for starters. they do very little and expect $99/mo for a basic plan

    • tyre 10 years ago

      This!

      Their business pricing, which includes SSL, starts at $399 per month.

      Or you can self-host with something like http://staytus.co/

      Yes you have to set up multi-AZ deployment, but that's super simple on AWS. Add in their new free SSL certs and voila!

      Even as a small startup, that's easily worth the time to save nearly $5k per year.

      • nodesocket 10 years ago

        This is exactly the developer behavior that can cause a good startup to fail. Stop trying to optimize every penny! Optimize what matters. Your business.

        Sure, you can spin up two, three, four instances in AWS across multiple availability zones. Sure, you can install Ubuntu and manage servers. Sure, you can setup an ELB, or maybe you go the extra yard and configure NGINX. Sure you can deploy an open source rails or node status page app. All wasted energy and wasted cycles that should have been utilized on your idea directly.

        I've seen this attitude of extreme frugalness/cheapness and it seems to be a trait that engineers are almost proud of, and brag about. Toxic behavior.

        Disclosure: I am myself an engineer, but also founder.

        • borski 10 years ago

          This is very dependent. Spinning up your own status page takes incredibly little time, rather than paying $99/mo.

          On the other hand, spending more elsewhere, say, to keep good books or to acquire customers, makes perfect sense.

        • OJFord 10 years ago

          A small amount of work that will save $90pm is "optimis[ing] your business"!

        • tyre 10 years ago

          If we had millions of venture dollars, I might agree with you. When you're a small team with a small budget, those costs add up. We absolutely spend money on the things that matter, but as CEO I also have to worry about minimizing the costs that don't.

      • jbrooksuk 10 years ago

        For a more feature complete alternate, check out https://cachethq.io

    • nodesocket 10 years ago

      Pricing is not a value prop. $99 is actually a smart and fair price, their target market is businesses, not individual developers, and hobbyist.

      • encoderer 10 years ago

        Serving a lower price point is a perfectly valid strategy.

        That said, I agree with you that there is a reason their pricing is high. It's a more profitable business. Unless you're Netflix it's hard to build a business charging $10/mo. So compete on price, sure, but it can't hurt to find a few rough spots on their product that you can improve. When we launched cronitor.io we at first competed on price but we also had objectively better technology: faster alerting, etc. As we've developed the product we've been able to charge more and it's worked out well.

downtide 10 years ago

I'm on Linux with Xfce. I have tried and failed to get a dark theme working. It's difficult to match across toolkits.

I've had web browsers that default to white screen flashing on new tabs, and most don't respect your native theme.

My current workaround]in Firefox is to disable background images, set default foreground/background and link colours. Set a default font, and ensure font sizes don't fall below a certain size.

Some text inputs have a dark background and a dark font. Which makes things very difficult. I'm typing blind.

Another issue is that many designs use background images where you would expect foreground placement. For example Instagram doesn't work for me. Slack is usable, but some image previews are lost. Other sites that rely upon imagery for navigation can pose a problem. The compose window in Gmail, I have to use mystery meat navigation to work out each button's function. Which is quite poor.

I've tried setting my own stylesheets in browsers where you can, but it's easy to break layouts.

Obviously accessibility is still overlooked by many site designers.

I also don't like being stuck in one browser, so a better cross application solution is preferable, rather than site specific fixes.

tommoor 10 years ago

OP: Did you try this on Mac? I'm pretty sure Electron is only being used on Windows and Linux unless they recently made the switch..

  • laCourOP 10 years ago

    You're totally right, just checked. Never even crossed my mind that they wouldn't be. Updated the post.

  • coloradude 10 years ago

    AFAIK Electron has always been cross platform. But yes it is very much on available on Mac.

    • farnsworth 10 years ago

      I think he means whether the Slack app is using Electron on OS X. At one point they used MacGap.

derFunk 10 years ago

So when can we expect the first Slack exploits abusing the slack protocol handler and the js evaluation function? :)

  • MatthewWilkes 10 years ago

    Yeah, this feels more like an (unintentional) irresponsible vulnerability disclosure, despite how fun it was reading.

  • yeldarb 10 years ago

    My first thought too. The platform seems ripe for its first worm.

perishabledave 10 years ago

Slightly aside, but is there any evidence that the warmth of the light effects sleep? The cited paper compares a light emitting device to a book, which would not be the same as f.lux and this.

Not trying to dismiss this. I'd genuinely like to know as I'm often on my computer late at night.

farnsworth 10 years ago

Cool hack, but an even better solution would be for Electron to support userstyles (and scripts). I won't be surprised if we gradually standardize on Electron or something like it for cross-platform desktop apps, and it would be great for them to be as hackable as the web.

tjmehta 10 years ago

It is a Stylish theme for Slack in the browser.

Here is a link to the Github project: https://github.com/laCour/slack-night-mode

I wish the Slack App had a night theme..

  • patates 10 years ago

    In the article there is a solution for the desktop app too, only not for the Mac.

Gravityloss 10 years ago

I often use reverse colors on OSX. ctrl-alt-cmd-8. Since most pages have white backgrounds, this results in black backgrounds.

It's also very nice that Flux is applied after this so I don't get a dark blue screen.

r0s 10 years ago

I use a mix of stylish themes to achieve something similar, and hide Slack's grating UI and default colors.

rco8786 10 years ago

Reading...reading...

Oh my god they're `eval`ing url components

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