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I wish we could get back to a “mom and pop” software market. Itch.io feels like it’s doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.
Kiki's themes can be edited to suit one's personal tastes. The theme .css files are about 120 lines long.
Should have been written with bouba philosophy.
"It's built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos"

Does anyone do this? Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.

Sometimes we build things for the way it should be, rather than the way it is.
The design philosophy says you should be able to repair your own tools, but this is closed source proprietary software.

Cute page, but does not walk the walk.

It's not closed source.
I'm not going to blame you _too_ much, since I had similar suspicion, but you could have (as I did) just downloaded the .zip file and examined the contents. In the shareware version, some things are probably missing (I think not all themes are there), but otherwise it's just a bunch of PHP files, no obfuscation or anything. The markup language is configured in a text file, and the parser for that file is just next to it. The configuration is used for configuring the markup parser, which is also present. And so on. It's not open-source only if your definition of OSS is "has to have a Github page".
Just because you can see the source code does not make it open source. Shareware software is proprietary software.

Open source means free software, which is a license that allows unrestricted use of the source code. Shareware isn’t free (as in speech OR as in beer) software.

The definition of OSS is well defined, and isn’t my definition. This is why there is a term called “OSI-approved license”.

It's not open source but you can repair it yourself. So it does walk the walk.
No. Shareware does not provide you with a license that allows modification.
This is a tangent to this post, but...

I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.

I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.

https://ibb.co/7dRCnWrp https://ibb.co/1GWwDKLY

Oh man. That really stinks. Losing a pet is hard. Hang in there.
I'm sorry to hear about Kiki. She's very beautiful, thanks for sharing.

She reminds me of my tuxedo cat Bob who recently passed. I remember laying down all night in the comfort room before he had to be put down and sobbing knowing how much pain he was in. It's really hard.

I think a memorial site is a lovely idea, I created one for my cat as well: https://bob.duchastel.com

i'm so sorry. i went through that with one of my own recently. please make sure she knows she is loved.
May her passing be a gentle one.

For what it's worth, a random person on the internet just shed a tear for the both of you.

That sucks, sorry about Kiki. Nothing sucks more than losing a cat.
> kiki was built around the idea that the web took a wrong turn a couple of decades ago. HTML was supposed to be simple and straightforward

Hear, hear. We need more of this kind of courage to start over from first principles.

> kiki is shareware.

Now that is a blast from the past.

Is much else distributed that way these days?

Commander Keen! Duke Nukem! Leisure Suit Larry! Scorched Earth! Lemmings!

Happy times

A fair amount of software follows the model but does not use the term, everytime I go on the play store to look for an app I encounter many that offer a free version with limited features.
PHP was and still is the best.
I dunno, PHP seems to have a lot of foot-guns.

include $_GET[...], register_globals, magic quotes, extract($_REQUEST), weak comparisons, loose typing, eval, risky file upload defaults/patterns, preg_replace /e, dangerous deserialization gadget chains, path traversal into includes, and the whole "URLs can be file paths" abstraction...

PHP is basically "RCE-as-a-Service" as far as I'm concerned. Allowing a URL in any function that wanted a file path was an absolutely bone-headed design choice. They made `curl | php` a language feature.

Like everything it depends on your goals. As a novice developer PHP is wonderful. Everything you see as an obvious security failing is exactly what made it great to a new dev back when most of that was still allowed by default.
That must be the first time in a very long time that I've seen something claim to support PHP 4.
Oh ! i cannot see myself doing php again, loved the language and have some good memories too but that me was 10 years ago
The best part of the no-build, small-footprint approach is longevity: no dependency rot, nothing to maintain, and it'll still open and run in ten years. We've half-forgotten that "view source and hack it" is how a lot of us learned the web in the first place. Good to see tools that lean back into that.
that font color is impossible to read on the black background

I'm guessing this is made for a specific audience who dig this type of UI

It's not impossible for me to read, but it is uncomfortable enough that it'd give me a headache if I tried to read it.
Hello, neat project. I am also from Edmonton area. I wonder if we have talked previously, in the the late 90s I ran a local BBS system with my colleague.