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Welcome to the CozyNet Blog!

What has CozyNet been up to?

It’s been a little quiet around the blog of late, but don’t worry because I’ve actually been working all week on a little project for the site!

Some of you might recall internet homepages like MSN, Yahoo, Netscape, the list goes on. These days homepages for the most part have either become a thing of the past or annoyingly ham-fisted into the New Tab page of modern browsers so propaganda can be rammed down your throat along with your morning coffee.

I wasn’t really ever fond of homepages, except for that one time where I believe it was Yahoo that allowed you to make a custom homepage with all sorts of cool widgets. Typically they’re just ad filled web waste with a search form at the top. When Google search came out, it was one of the first to have a simple clean page without all the crap, and to this day they’ve kept to that approach.

Part of why I found homepages lame was because I was just a kid back then and they always had some boomer FUD about wars in Iraq, terrorists, spiraling economy, end of the world stuff. I wanted to see game news, flash games, funny videos of the day, dope ass WindowBlinds themes, a project spotlight! It could have been great, but it never happened, and now today I’m an internet boomer myself.

So I had a great idea about a week ago while I was bored at work, and that was to make a homepage; and not just a private homepage, but a public one that anyone can use! Check it out!

So this it pretty niche. I’m not trying to make something for a wide audience here bros. If you’re familiar with image boards and the alt-tech sub / counter culture areas of the internet, then this might make the perfect homepage for you! It’s also kind of specific to me and my interests too, so there’s that to keep in mind as well…

But the idea is that you can make it into your web browsers homepage, pull it up throughout the day and then quickly scan over some of the daily or weekly topics. At the moment I have three primary topic sections, “Cozy Corner,” “Tek NEET,” and “News General.” I might add more or move things around in the future. Also the Schiz-O-Monitors section would have some cool schizo tools. Right now it’s just the GCP graph, but a Gematria calculator would be cool to have if I could figure out how to set one up.

I tried keeping the use of Javascript down and not dependent on the functionality of the site. It just complements a few things, like the input auto-focus switcher when changing the search type or the music player.

The most difficult part out of all of this was making that dang web search box. At first I was using the DuckDuckGo search widget, which they copied from Yahoo’s search widget that would live within an iframe. Since it looked like ass and I couldn’t adjust the theme (because it’s remote content), I figured I would just make a SearXNG search box by ripping off what I saw in their search box. Basically it’s just a form POST with some input options that would be forwarded by the user client to the SearXNG instance. This worked pretty great, until the instance I was using was rate limited into oblivion. Not a good experience, and thus why I don’t use SearX, which is too bad because I wish it could work.

So then I decided to use what I had learned with the SearX search form and apply it to a custom DuckDuckGo search box. This was a complete slog because I had to reverse engineer their friggin URL system. It looks simple now if you inspect element, but it was complicated because I wanted this to work without depending on Javascript!

Now I’m not 100% certain, but I did carefully check the apache HTTP logs and I didn’t see any search queries or header info when performing a search, so I’m pretty sure that it’s private and all on the client side, so you shouldn’t have to worry about me MITM search queries to DDG.

The search box is actually four individual boxes set on top of each other, then with a little CSS magic you can flip between them by the tab options above. I also added a Wiby search! The only problem with this is that it’s not keyboard accessible and the buttons are a little easy to miss.

Also one more thing to mention is the crypto price stats. I have a script on the backend that retrieves crypto values from a bitfinex API that runs as a cron job every minute. At first I had the iframe reload itself every minute, but I decided to make it static, so you'll have to refresh the page to see changes.

Conclusion:

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s at a point now that I believe it can be used. I would like to add more stuff to the page over time and experiment. Now don’t expect me to update it every hour of every day, or even every day! I don’t have that kind of time, but I will keep it updated with stuff on most days.

If you want to add it as a homepage to your web browser, don’t forget to enable the “Home” button, since it’s now a thing to disable that by default these days.

Thanks for reading my blog!


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Comments:

  • thats really cool good job
    Aug 10, 2023 Permalink Reply
    • Is DuckDuckGo one of those search engines with nearly impossible-to-use search APIs with basic HTML forms?
      Jul 13, 2023 Permalink Reply
      • I don't think so. All search queries are sent by the GET request method to DDG by appending to the URL. I said POST in the blog though, which was a mistake... - Cozy (1/2)
        Jul 13, 2023 Permalink Reply
        • Read the following to learn how it works:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Forms/Sending_and_retrieving_form_data#on_the_client_side_defining_how_to_send_the_data

-Cozy (2/2)
          Jul 13, 2023 Permalink Reply
      • You made my day: can't sto laughing
Cool bro
        Jul 12, 2023 Permalink Reply
        • Reminds me of https://weboasis.app (RIP Webby 1992-2022)
          Jul 10, 2023 Permalink Reply
          • I love the idea, but you just can't beat the plain black new tab page
            Jul 10, 2023 Permalink Reply
            • Very good! It even works well on w3m without CSS.
              Jul 9, 2023 Permalink Reply
              • Personally for a homepage I just have one I copied from Github and modified it to my own needs. I should make one from scrach though
                Jul 9, 2023 Permalink Reply
                • Bretty gud.
                  Jul 9, 2023 Permalink Reply
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