More site updates

If you want dark mode on Firefox or Chrome/Chromium use the Dark Reader plugin,

and on MS Edge, for those who use the Windows default browser (it’s actually Chrome under the bonnet)

which works really well for the majority of sites, it’s a lot more sophisticated than simply inverting the colours, and you can choose the brightness and contrast levels.

and you can tweak the filters, – which can make a difference on things like strap headers and graphics with transparency, e.g. https://www.racefans.net/

As for RISC OS; until there is a released dark theme for the desktop, there isn’t much point on web sites, you wont see it over the glare.

The first stage of that would be easy:
In Pinboard, Set the background as plain colour, with black background and white Icon text

But, yeah, open a window or two and the glare is there.
Then there all the applications to consider.
NetSurf – producing a dark theme might be a nice project for someone who doesn’t really do programming,

A belated update:

Shoulder operation was last Wednesday. I’m recovering fine, but it’s rather uncomfortable as shoulder operations tend to be, so between that and only really being able to lie on my back in bed, sleep is a bit hard to come by. I’m not rushing getting back into coding, or even online presence much beyond lurking!

I have now finished getting all the repos set up in GitLab, though, so if the mood takes you, the new Rails and related code is browsable at:

https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/website

Although I’m working alone on the site I’m following a Gitflow-style workflow, so the default develop branch is for work in progress features being compiled for release, main carries the live web site code and work-in-progress is on feature/foo or bugfix/foo branches.

Many repositories have a change history that starts (a little artificially) at ~old-SVN level code and then there’s a huge merge of the Rails 8 dumped on top. One or two start at a newer base. I had trouble bringing Radiant over from GitHub so that’s a clean check-in. The Hub SSO app changes are indicative of some of the kind of work needed to go from Rails 1/2 to Rails 8, and bearing in mind that this is one of the smaller diffs, you can get an idea of what a jump covering more than 15 years of change looks like via https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/website/hubssolib/-/merge_requests/12/diffs.

CSS updates won’t make sense without realising that the base stylesheet is being fetched directly from https://www.riscosopen.org/css/risc_os_open_2025.css for dev logistics reasons and not yet under source control in GitLab.

CSS updates won’t make sense without realising that the base stylesheet is being fetched directly from https://www.riscosopen.org/css/risc_os_open_2025.css for dev logistics reasons and not yet under source control in GitLab.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited here, thanks for your continued work on the website Andrew.

My journey with CSS is a long and complicated one, the subject field is expanding in a rich variety of directions, the pace of change in CSS is unlike anything in the past. There have been a number of improvements with the use of dark mode, for instance the light-dark() function (https://web.dev/articles/light-dark). The practical example given at https://web.dev/articles/light-dark#practical_application shows how it can be used instead of the prefers-color-scheme. At the very least, you can see straight away with the CSS rule, the choice of light/dark colours applied, and it uses less markup to achieve the same effect.

The light-dark() function has been part of Baseline since May 2024, so I wouldn’t expect it to be supported in RISC OS browsers as yet. But it’s certainly something to consider.

One other point, I noticed we are only linking to socials such as Facebook and X – we should be linking to alternatives, such as Mastodon and Bluesky as well. We can possibly make use of the Web Share API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Share_API) so it can tie into whichever apps are installed on a user’s computer or phone.

I think that’s enough malarkey from me!