devlog 00

Ok... we are doing this.

In a sleepless night of the previous week, I was watching some Action Retro videos on youtube and remembered about FrogFind, the search engine for retro computers created by Sean, from Action Retro. I knew what FrogFind was, but never really looked into it, and I was suprised! the project is not just a search engine, on top of that, It's also a proxy that cleans-up websites in a attempt to make them usable on really, really old computers.

Take a look on what FrogFind does to some websites:
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Well, you could take a look, but FrogFind is actually down now =( Trust me when I say that when you click on a search result inside FrogFind, it's removes all javascript and fancy CSS of the page and only leaves basic HTML behind. With FrogFind it is (or was) possible to browse the modern web with Netscape, Windows 9x and even on a 1983 Apple IIe!

After that, I started wondering if I could create something like that for ao3. The archive site is already pretty basic, not a lot of bloat, but the experience is still not great on a device that only has a really basic browser and 512mb of ram to work with (basically, a Kindle). This is for a lot of reasons. Firstly, any website is a challenge to run on a kindle. Also, ao3 interface is not optimized for a black and white e-ink display. Lastly, the biggest offense: the text is just a little to small, which wouldn't be such a problem if amazon didn't fuck the article mode (also, fuck amazon, jailbreak your kindle).

So the idea is do the same thing that FrogFind does: strip down ao3 to basic HTML and maybe just a little CSS, trying to make a good experience on limited devices.

The only problem is that I have no clue of what i'm doing =)

I know some python and some stuff about flask, because i'm having some classes on that, but I never created a full fledged project, and I don't want to sign The Pact! So this is going to be really slow and a lot of spaghetti code will be created. If you know more stuff than me and want to help, the project will be open source. When I publish the 0.1 version or whatever I will put a link on the homepage.

If possible I would love to see ao3 running on even older and more limited devices, so I'm actually going to divide this project in two:

• aOld3: Focused on optimizing ao3 experience for limited, but modern devices (kindles, stuff running dillo, etc.)
• aOlder3: Focused on ancient computers and browsers (IE and older)

But that's going to take a while to happen. Right now I have a really basic search functioning thanks to ao3_api (after hours of trying to do everything myself, because I didn't know this existed).

Keep checking in on this website to read more devlogs and be up to date on the project. Really hope this works out in the end!