About me and this website

Page created: 1997-12-15 , updated: 2023-07-20

Me

Howdy, I’m Dave Gauer. I’ve worked in web technologies since the late 1990s.

What I’m up to right now!

Some interests: computer programming of all kinds, Linux/BSD/Unix, art, books (genre fiction, computing, history, biographies, art monographs), film, music (metal!), boardgames, and watching small creatures in the back yard

If you’re ready for the deep dive, check out my cards (mostly short) notes about various topics.

Me elsewhere:

@ratfactor at mastodon.art (art and technology, general chat)
github.com/ratfactor (personal programming projects)
ratfactor.SDF.org (mostly Gopher posts, haven’t been active as of late)
goodreads.com/ratfactor (for anything books - am interested in alternatives)
~~@ratfactor at twitter.com~~ (I’m out. See Mastodon above)

I sometimes use this avatar:

It’s the "Bob" version of Tux the Penguin (a la Slackware Linux). I’ll often use that on tech-oriented sites. It’s cropped from a watercolor I did in my sketchbook quite a while ago:

watercolor image of a penguin in a toga working on a computer perched atop a marble column. penguin has a pipe and martini glass

"Ancient King Slackware Computes at the Altar"

And sometimes I use this avatar, which is another watercolor I did expressly to use as an avatar:

watercolor sketch of a rat with an eye patch

"Ratfactor"

This website

I’ve been running this website since 1997.

This website has:

No advertising
No tracking/cookies
No JavaScript unless used by a tool on the page
No bloat (check out ratfactor’s css file)
No so-called "AI" content (What Sandra writes here (idiomrottning.org) sums up my feelings beautifully.)
Of course there’s a humans.txt (updated in this glorious year of 2023)
Home page is currently under 100 Kb total: 1mb.club | 512kb.club | 250kb.club

Browse this website with your favorite terminal program or screen reader!

This may be controversial, but I strongly believe in allowing access to this website via both HTTPS and HTTP. Unencrypted HTTP can be accessed by extremely low-power machines and extremely simple software. TLS is very important, but it does come with a non-trivial complexity and computational cost.

In short, I agree with Consider Disabling HTTPS Auto Redirects (1mb.club).

RATFACTOR.COM HAS BEEN UNDER CONTINUOUS CONSTRUCTION SINCE 1997!

I try to follow the wisdom that Cool URIs don’t change (w3.org).

This website is designed to last (jeffhuang.com).

You should make a website too! The "Start a website" instructions at LandChad.net look pretty good to me. It’s remarkably similar to the setup I’m running these days. Also check out Derek Sivers’s Tech Independence (sive.rs).