About

NostraDavid; the author

I’m someone who’s sick of the state of the web and you know what they say:

Improve the world, start with yourself - Bond Zonder Naam

This is why I started with the basics: HTML, CSS and JS. Anything else is deemed bloat

Thaumatorium

The name

It’s based on the word thaumaturge, meaning miracle worker, thus Thaumatorium is where miracles are performed.

The reason - the why

I wanted a place where I could post my articles, but I found my free Wordpress site too slow, too bloated, too messy, so I started to search for a way to still create and host articles, without needing bloat like Wordpress.

I started with thinking about using something like Angular and React. They were the hot new thing in town, so why not try that? Turns out they both have a tendency to become pretty damn complex pretty damn fast - that’s my personal experience anyway.

After finding Elm, a Haskell-like language that compiles to JS I though to use that as it promised small and (more importantly) fast websites.

After learning the creator wasn’t the… most cooperating of persons I decided to move on before even clashing with him.

I quickly found the Blazor beta, which seemed promising, especially in the PWA department. Downsides: the output is rather huge (4MB+ in size) and the code is based on the Mono lib, not the fastest of libs.

So I ended up thinking: What’s left after removing all and anything bloat? HTML. CSS. JS… So why not create my site in that? So I set out to create a PWA - a single HTML page that contains the whole site.

The site quickly grew too big for this, so I changed it up by splitting the site in separate HTML pages, but index.html contained the generic header/footer HTML, while the other HTML files contained the articles.

In doing so - splitting the site, but mostly handling things like a PWA - I broke the back/forward buttons and browser history…

In the end I decided in writing just separate HTML pages, which means I have a bunch of duplicate HTML, but I’m OK with that, as I know enough REGEX to edit all HTML headers in one fell swoop!

The cure

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. – Eleanor Roosevelt

We (the internet at large) are too busy with discussing people, not even events. I want to see the internet move back to discussing ideas. That was more the case on Reddit back in the days - Reddit on 2008-12-29 was much more about ideas, not events or people.

The normies have invaded the internet. That’s not necessarily bad, but what is is that they came in such numbers they did not need to adapt to our netizenship and changed our internet culture. For the worse, mind you. I hope to one day have enough influence to change that, for the betterment of humanity.