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blog.lacour.me

72 pointslaCour38 comments

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_inpu...

You can customise the colors according to your preference.

I also like the FT Deep Dark theme for firefox.

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..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Yes, and plenty to read on the subject. Look around for blue light and sleep / circadian rhythm / melatonin production.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/

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.

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..

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

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.

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

Reading...reading...

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

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