27/08/26 09:20
This site was down for quite a while as I shut my homeserver down during the recent heatwave. I stumbled across This blog post that was submitted to Hacker News, and I really liked the old-web style of the sites homepage - so much so, that it inspired me to migrate my own site to a low-power box and get it up and running again. I changed the whole software stack and learned a ton, but that's a topic for another blog post.
I was quite amused by some of the 88x31 web badges, and started looking into them. For example, here is lina.sh's (home of the blog post I mentioned earlier):
The peak of their popularity was a bit before I got online, but they're still popular on the small/indie web. I think they're a really neat way to link to stuff you like and show support for (or against :P ) things, so I've started adding a bunch to my homepage.
For a long time I've been vaguely against having superfluous images on my site - I care about it being lightweight - but I'm making an exception for these fun little buttons. The homepage's size has increased from ~16kb to ~75kb (over the network, 3x those numbers without gzip), but 1/3 of that is still the favicon anyway, and since I didn't care about that before, it doesn't make sense to start now. The loading times are still acceptable even on a patchy 3G connection, especially since text loads first. If 3.5 megabytes is good enough for the Google homepage (with an adblocker!), 75kb is just fine for me.
EDIT: Now 175kb because I keep collecting images - point still stands.
There are some cool archives of these web badges - I'll just list a bunch here:
But for all the thousands out there, there were a few ideas I had but couldn't find, or didn't like the ones I did find. So, I made some! I used Hekate2's button maker to create these:
They're definitely a bit rough and unprofessional, but it's kind of charming and I'm happy enough with how they turned out. After all, 
. I want to create a couple more for other cool stuff on the web. Check out Ramseses button generator too, which can do animated GIFs.
And of course, feel free to download them and use them on your own site :) - just don't hotlink. You can browse /88x31/, or download everything with wget -r -nd -np https://ryankrage77.me/88x31/ -A gif,png,avif.