Rendering stylish rss feeds
I was browsing for a way to do raw rss feeds when I came across this blog post from Darek Kay about styling rss feeds. Don’t ask me why I was searching about doing rss manually, I’m still not sure on what to do if I have that knowledge. Anyway, the blog post was informative. Rather than showing raw, unstyled xml when you click on the rss link (for this blog in particular it’s https://marmar22.tilde.team/blog/feed.rss, although it’ll download the file instead of opening it in the browser. This may be due to it ending in .rss instead of .xml), it links a stylesheet of sorts where it transforms the xml to html and css that your browser can display (at least, that’s how I understand after reading it).
However, I tried opening one of the example rss feeds such as https://darekkay.com/atom.xml in Firefox and it put out an error (in particular it’s Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (80004004) followed by the link to the stylesheet in red). This happened with all other examples listed, so I thought it was just broken at some point until I decided to open it in Chromium and it worked like a charm. Huh, I didn’t think this was that obscure of a functionality to only be on Chromium and not on Firefox. It’s only a linked stylesheet right?
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a problem on Firefox’s side this time. What happened was that NoScript, which I have as an extension on Firefox is interfering with the stylesheet loading. I didn’t realise it at the time as the NoScript applet didn’t show a number (which is an indicator on how many scripts have been blocked from executing). However, when I clicked on the applet, it showed an error (In order to operate on this tab, NoScript needs to reload it. Proceed?). Okay… was this something that NoScript wasn’t tested against? I’m not particularly sure…
I guess that’s all. Seems like this went to a tech rant halfway in. Oops :P
Scrolling
I don’t know if this is a common issue, but all the mice I’ve used had their scroll wheel broken. I didn’t use them aggressively, probably often, but certainly less than what I would expect to make it break. I don’t have expensive mice, just the normal office ones, so it’s not that bad for me, but still.
Now that doesn’t mean I want to buy another mouse. Only the scroll wheel doesn’t work. All the other buttons work (so like, left and right click? It’s not a gaming mouse). It’s just that I have to use different methods to scroll through websites and apps.
Fortunately, there are several ways to do it. The most straightforward is using the scrollbar on the left. It shouldn’t be that much of a nuisance if the scrollbar were how it was a decade ago. For context, back then, scrollbars took a dedicated space beside the webpage, and it stayed there in perpetuity (except if the page isn’t scrollable). Nowadays, it’s barely visible and hides itself if you don’t have your cursor near it. It’s not unusable, but it’s still a pretty bad experience. It’s especially atrocious to encounter websites with bright and colourful backgrounds that I can barely make out the scroll wheel on (not the website’s fault).
There are also other methods, such as using the spacebar. However, for that, you have to click on certain regions for it to scroll, as the spacebar also functions as selecting or ticking a checkbox when being focused on those elements. Also, it’s not as universal, as sites like YouTube would override it to function as a pause button. That leaves the last method I know of, which is the PageUp and PageDown buttons. I admit, I don’t see the purpose of these buttons except what the name implies, to go up or down a page. I haven’t found a website that overrides these buttons, though you do need to click on the place you want to scroll in the case that there are multiple scrollable elements in a webpage (why).
It makes me glad that I don’t really have to go out of my way to buy a new mouse or go and try to fix it, even though the other methods take a while to get used to. I guess this is what some people say about how accessibility helps everyone.