> They can only last if they’re simple to maintain, otherwise keeping them working becomes tedious and the author eventually gives up.<p>This, x1000.<p>I cannot count how many hobby projects I have outright abandoned at the first failure, never to return. The fix may have been simple too! I'll never know, though: the startup effort required to re-contextualize myself with the complex mess I'd made was never worth it at the time, and the longer you let them languish the less-likely you are to return. RIP, projects.<p>Simple Lasts Longer.
This reminds me of Hello World Enterprise Edition: <a href="https://gist.github.com/lolzballs/2152bc0f31ee0286b722" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/lolzballs/2152bc0f31ee0286b722</a><p>Sometime people really like to complicate instead of keeping things simple. Not just for show off but they genuinely believe something more complicated is better. Better such as it has better security, it has better extendability and is more generic. Even if those features were never in the actual business requirements.<p>I am amazed no one has written Hello World Microservice Edition. So you can have a fancy React UI, a Gateway, an User service, an Authorisation service, a Notification service, an Audit service, a Pricing service and a Printing service.
Local Storage falls apart on iPad/iPhone, unfortunately. The data is deleted if you don’t visit the site often enough. I lost my Wordle stats over a vacation this way.<p>Even worse, if you have an HTML game hosted on itch.io (which uses a cross-domain iframe, for security), Safari just silently discards all Local Storage when you close the tab, with no option to disable this behavior on a specific site.<p>I know Local Storage is supposed to be just a cache, but I really wish we had opt-in durable storage…
Cookie clicker does something similar for importing and exporting saves, and it is an absolute joy to not have to fiddle with accounts and be able to backup your own data. I’d love to see more applications move to this model, it’s very user-friendly.
Are there any ideas / draft proposals about browser access to shared cloud storage? (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.) The ability to store data on the user-side in a way that they control and is still cloud-available to multiple devices may be a feature that's just too user-empowering to be supported.
This is the philosophy behind Bear Blog. It’s built to last longer than me.<p><a href="https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-forever/" rel="nofollow">https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-foreve...</a>
Using offline storage is the approach I use in most of my hobby projects. It's simpler, and faster (in developing and in usage) and there are no loading screens.<p>In my kindle-clippings-manager (<a href="https://github.com/karlosos/kindle_clippings_webapp">https://github.com/karlosos/kindle_clippings_webapp</a>) I import highlights from Kindle and store them in localStorage. The major drawback is a size limitation (10MB). This should not be a problem in most cases but if you need to store more data then indexedDB (with bigger limits but more complexity) can solve the issue.<p>Linear (<a href="https://linear.app/" rel="nofollow">https://linear.app/</a>) uses its sync engine to store the data in Web Storage. With optimistic updates, it feels like an offline app. You can read more about the sync engine here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519448">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519448</a>
It'd be excellent if Export/Import has a standard format.<p>Especially if we see adoption on the Storage Buckets standard, sites will be able to partition up their storage into different concerns. Maybe there's some users data (xdg config[1]), some cache (xdg cache[1]), some app state ([1]), and each can be saved into a different bucket. Then a standard export/import standard would let folks save and load data easily? Maybe in interesting cross-site ways, where we import/export data? <a href="https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html" rel="nofollow">https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...</a><p>I was super scared this article was going to glorify an impractical disconnected imo useless "simple." Very glad to see import/export handled; simple, but very much in users power to let connectivity happen, to spread their data, as connected apps have so powerfully let us do.
> "They can only last if they’re simple to maintain, otherwise keeping them working becomes tedious and the author eventually gives up."<p>avoiding third-party services/APIs and fickle build tools will get you 99% there. not always possible.<p>i remember the days when APIs and aggregation was the trend. yahoo pipes was the peak.
>Hobby projects are fragile. They can only last if they’re simple to maintain, otherwise keeping them working becomes tedious and the author eventually gives up.<p>Literally why I always choose Windows over Linux, Intel/Nvidia over AMD, air cooling over water cooling, etc. for all my computers.<p>Life is short, ain't nobody got time for jank no more.
I've recently been making much simpler projects, and simplifying old projects too. I don't have as much time for maintenance as I did during COVID.<p>On the other hand, my most complicated project ran just fine for 3 years. I dreaded touching it because it was too hard to reason about, but it worked.
I wonder if you do not have more interesting things to see in Paris than crude Space Invader pixel art. That would be really neat if it was all over Chelyabinsk or Sao Paolo, or maybe some derelict US suburbia. But Paris? Come on!<p>Same thing with London and Banksy, btw. Of all the things you could see.
> This works by default, without any permission prompts.<p>How come? Is WebStorage exempt from GDPR? (I searched a bit and found both yes and no answers.)