~login@TTBP



19 december 2017

centralfeels now works statically

In the past, the centralfeels page would use JavaScript to request data.json through XMLHttpRequest (what many of you would colloquially call AJAX, even though in this case it's asynchronous JavaScript and JSON rather than asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and then create the appropriate HTML and insert it into the DOM on the client. I realised that this broke the experience for NoScript users and those users who preferred not to enable JavaScript by default. It also made search engines not index the content on centralfeels (which, it could be argued, was a virtue).

Now, the centralfeels page along with its content is generated by the server itself. This means that NoScript users and those users that don't enable JavaScript can view the page just fine. Search engines will now be able to index the page just fine.

Also, I've left data.json just in case someone else wants to use it. It'll save them the time required to write a scraper for centralfeels. They'll be happier not to write a scraper than I'll be sad to let data.json remain, so the total happiness of the world would increase, so whatever.