Croissant Update and Dexie

Croissant v0.5 has been released!

I have improved the favicon fetcher from the last update. Croissant will now go HTML spelunking because not enough blogs have a default favicon.ico.

I have added a “Close as Unread” button to the end of the reader view. This is the closest you’re getting to a ‘Bookmark’ feature :) It’s next to the “External Link” button which opens the original item URL in your web browser. I don’t like the placement or label of either button but they exist as they are for now.

I changed the fallback title for titleless items to include the time (it used to be just date). This is because some microblogs publish multiple notes on the same day.

That is all!

Dexie Vibes and FOSS

Croissant won’t see another update until next year unless I’m forced to fix any bugs. I did yolo a Dexie update. Dexie is the only 3rd-party JavaScript dependency. It makes IndexedDB usable. I like Dexie because I dislike IndexedDB.

I was disappointed to see Dexie’s new website looks like generic vibe-coded VC-funded slopware. It’s neither, as far as I know. That might be a little harsh — there’s no “AI” sparkles — but the site is Next.js which is unforgivable.

The old website (old.dexie.org) had some charm to it. The new website has broken links and the docs haven’t improved. I hope better documentation is planned. But I can’t really complain it’s FOSS and I ain’t paying.

The databases powering your company? Built by developers working double shifts. Those JavaScript frameworks everyone depends on? Often shepherded by a single person, unpaid, drowning in demands.

Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away - It’s FOSS

Yikes, sounds familiar. Dexie has a cloud premium service so maybe it’s making good bank?

Croissant is technically not FOSS because the license only allows personal use.

Croissant (the “Software”) is provided free of charge for personal, non-commercial use. You may not redistribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software.

Croissant license

The purpose of this was to keep my code away from whatever GitHub has become and the giant plagiarism machines. Entirely futile I know, but I’m not an AI-inevitablist. Part of the reason Croissant is so minimal and opinionated is to avoid burnout.

Croissant is close to feature complete for my liking but I may give it a facelift next year. I still like the idea of making Croissant themable. I want to at least provide more customisable typographic styles.

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