Dear self proclaimed wordpress 'developers/programmers', kindly go fuck yourself.

I'm not talking about wordpress devs/designers who don't claim to have a better skillset than they have and are actually willing to learn, those are very much fine.

I'm talking about those wordpress people who claim that they're developers, programmers or whatever kind of bullshit which they're obviously not.

"A client's site crashed, you have to fix it!!!!!" sorry, come again? It's YOUR client's site. It's hosted on our hosting platform meaning that WE are responsible for KEEPING THE SERVERS UP AND FUNCTIONING.
You call yourself a wordpress 'developer' with 'programming experience' for 10 years but the second one of your shitty sites crashes, you come to us because 'it's your responsibility!!!'.
No, it's not. Next to that fact, the fact that you have to ask US why the site is crashing while you could easily login to your control panel, go to the fucking error logs and see that one of your facebook plugins crashes with a quite English error message, shows me that you definitely don't have 10 years of programming experience. And if you can't find that fucking article which tells you exactly where the motherfucking error logs are, don't come crying to us asking to fix your own fucking bullshit.

"My clients site got hacked, you have to clean it up and get it online again ASAP!!!!" - Nah, sorry, not my responsibility. The fact that you explicitly put your wordpress installation on 'no automatic updates' also doesn't help with my urge to fucking end you right now.
Add to that that we have some quite clear articles on wordpress security which you appearantly found too difficult (really? basic shit like 'set a strong fucking password' is too difficult for you?), you're on your own.

"I'm getting an error, please explain what's going wrong as soon as you can! this is a prio 1!!!!" - Nope. You were a wordpress dev/programmer right? Please act like one.

I'm not your personal wordpress agent.

I'm not your personal hacked wordpress site cleanup guy.

I'm not even a fucking wordpress professional. No, I'd rather jump off a bridge than develop wordpress bullshit for a living.

That you chose to do this, not a problem. Just don't rely on me for fixing your shit.

I'm sick of cleaning up your bullshit.

I'm done with answering your high prio tickets about bullshit which any dev could find out with just a few minutes of searching.

Oh your wordpress site isn't showing up so high in google? Yeah sure, shoot a ticket at us blaming us for your own SEO mess. I'm a fucking sysadmin, not a SEO expert.

I'm fucking done with you.

Go die in a fucking corner.

Customer: IT is completely useless! I’m getting PORN ADS on my work computer!? This is ridiculous!!!

Friend: Oh that’s not good, perhaps your computer has a virus of some sort let me take a look!

Friend takes a look and sees that the porn ads were all provided by google ad service, they weren’t related to a virus.

Friend: so, you don’t have a virus, but so that you know google gathers metrics on the sites you visit so that it can target ads at you better. Looks like that’s what’s happening here.

Customer: .............

That moment when an SEO 'expert' asks if changing ip addresses will put his sites lower in Google.

I'm a fucking Linux engineer, how am I supposed to know that?!

Please live up to your fucking title "SEO *expert*" and don't ask some innocent Linux engineer about this shit 😡

Me: Hey Google, open devrant
Google: Results for dev brand

Me: open devrant
Google: Results for dev hand

Me: No! open "dev" "rant"
Google: Results of some dude named Dev Randhawa

Me: Dammit open devrant
Google: Dewa rent? Electricity bill paying sites of some town called dewa.

Me: Open d.e.v.r.a.n.t
Google: Opens Google play song from Kevin Durant.

Me: gives up and listens to Kevin Durant sing some shit about LeBron James.

Fucking wix advertisements! Getting real tired of the "want a website? Why not make it yourself?" ads. You're already logging all my fucking google searches to display relevant ad info so maybe wrap your head around the fact that I'm a web dev and make my own fucking sites??

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

A keyboard based on frequently used sites.

I should make another for Google lol

That moment when you google the error...
find the same query on three different sites...
realise that all three were posted by the same user...
and all three are unanswered.. 😑

Do you know what annoys the living fuck out of me?
Me: no...?
Me: may I tell?
Me: yes, please do!
Me: okay here we go:

Sites which use Google fonts or apis or ajax or other Google-hosted libraries.

It takes fucking ages to load those sites (if they lost et-all) since I block as much as possible from that cocksucking mass surveillance network.

Google, feel free to die in a fucking corner while getting an acid shower and being stripped of your skin layer by layer, as slow as possible to increase the pain and suffering.

I'm in grade 9.
I started a programming club in my school.
I told them that I'd teach basic HTML,JS,CSS,C++,C,Java.
Nobody signed up.
Because it happens on Thursdays.
FML.
However, people told other people that I have wicked programming skills and so one of the school staff asked me to help them maintain their school website, which is currently just Google Sites (*vomit).
:(

Freaking tech support.
Freaking sparkhire.

Their 'one-way interview' bs only supports flash. Flash. in production. in 2019. Flash died years ago, and its support ends next year. What the crap?

Anyway, I finally decided I should do the interview since they already have all of my information anyway. Thanks, "privacy-conscious" third party. Totally appreciate it.

I spent half an hour and couldn't get flash working on their site (but all other sites were fine), so I contacted their support. I gave them all the relevant specs (inc. ofc browser), the steps to reproduce, and all of my attempts at fixing the issue.

To their credit, I recieved a response within a few minutes. To their discredit: their response was: "What browser are you using?" This question was followed by my report (including, ofc, my browser and all the other overlooked details), immediately followed by a "debugging info" section appended by their support service that also included my browser, os, and other specs.

Learn to fucking read.

Their suggestion? Use google chrome. Barring that: record your 20-30 minute video by holding your phone in front of your face the entire time. I am so not kidding.

They also asked what page i was having difficulty on. You guessed it: the page url was also included within that "debugging info" section.

It wasn't a form letter, either. I'd understand if it was all automated, but it was a real person who was really typing up the emails, and really didn't bother reading a damned thing.

I did end up getting flash working, but their "tech support" (script-reader) was entirely useless.

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

Fucking hate sites with great SEO but shitty user experience like Quora. Top of Google but requires a login or else it's locked down like some university cheat site.

Fuck your low quality answers hidden behind a useless blurry paywall. You're a glorified Q&A. Go fuck yourself

Why do people need to make a video tutorial to explain the most basic stuff?

It's driving me crazy when I google something to find a million video tutorials, followed by all the useless sites like quora and yahoo answers. And, on page 48925725720, someone writes the answer in 2 lines.

I just received this gem this morning.
First of let me start by saying that I am against scammers and all this Nigerian prince crap.
But some of this shit is so bad that it actually pisses me off. My intelligence feels insulted.

Look at this email. These fuckers spent hours perfecting the Hotmail feel to it. The logo, design and even font are in par. As I started reading the shit, the spelling mistakes are so obvious that I wondered; do these nut suckers know that whatever email editor they use, it autocorrects for you? Are they just ignoring the recommendations? I mean they could've even used the "Did you mean" feature in Google. Or any of the freely available grammatical check sites out there.

Think of this as plagiarism. It's bad but a majority of us can appreciate a well planned out one.

I'm yet to encounter a really good scam email that almost had me click their link. There's always an obvious stand out! Is there like a copyright holder to a perfectly well put scam email?!

(And yes, you just read a rant about someone complaining that scammers aren't doing a great job)

So.. tons of sites have their Laravel .env file accessible...

Google this: filetype:env APP_ENV

So I read this morning about some web teacher. Here is my story:
In high school I had a teacher who was "THE GOTO WEB GUY", at least that was what other theachers thought. Here is what reallity looked liked in a lesson of his:
He comes up with some ancient example he just found on some tutorials page and he just remembered bits of how to do it. So when he got stuck he fired up a google search. When a student had a question he fired up a google search. Because he didn't know shit. Of course you cannot know everything but he was so cocky about his skills that it really annoyed me. Best part? He sold web sites (joomla) where his greates achievment was to change the color of the template. Everything he teached in that semester had I already learned through selfteaching and tutorials in an evening.

My school has a proxy to block games and some other sites. I was thinking of ways to get around, when I remembered, "I don't have to code anything, I can use google translate!"

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

4th grade. My parents left for the night and got a babysitter for me and my younger siblings. The babysitter showed me a game she likes in IE. You could make an account, raise a digital pet, a "neopet," play flash games for points to buy items from other users who listed them in their own stores that had custom css/html, including bg music. This was the first time I had really witnessed what the web could look like. Animated tiled gif bgs really amazed me so I took to google with which I discovered sites where one could copy css and html snippets for themes. I stored each new html tag I discovered via w3cschools.com in a powerpoint where the snippets I found were pasted somewhere randomly in the ppt. From there I learned html, CSS, and a billion other things. To date I've made websites, apps with several langs in win/Linux/osx/Android (but not ios yet). I've managed servers, and databases , and DNS records. I've in even ran website with 100k requests a day.

I like, that many code hosting sites are shutting down (Google Code, Codeplex). This does not mean those sites are bad.
The ones I like and use are GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket (and most personal ones like Gogs or GitLab CE).

Here is my list of the sites I don't like:
- Sourceforge
- SF
- sf.net
- sourceforge.net

When I need help with JavaScript, I google 'JS (insert query here)...'

When I need help with Go, I have to google 'Go programming (insert query here)...'

The extra term 'programming' is so search engines recognise I'm looking for answers related to the Go language.

Ironic, but Go is the least 'search engine friendly' language. Sites like O'Reilly and Packtpub return searches with uneven results.

I like js and node in general.
But there's this thing I hate about NodeJs...

The blogs. The goddamn blogs.

Every goddamn blog post. Is code. Dozens of lines of code.

Oh, so you want X feature? Just copy paste this shit.

I swear to god, blog posts are the source versioning system to these people.

What they should instead is
a) Create a package.
b) Add tests to it.
c) Present the package to the reader with some minimal code.

But I'm a getting a huge impression that node blog writers want you to copy the code in their post, paste it in your project, and be happy with it.

Now, I'm not assuming that every person posting in medium.com is a software engineer (and by engineer I mean an engineer, not some fuckwad who begs for github stars on dev communities).

The problem to me is that they fucking SATURATE the goddamn search results.

The same goes for finding an npm package for your need, because there are so many low quality packages it's saturated too, you have too plow this stinking pile of projects that have very low quality,
and there's not a really good npm finder out there. Half of them are dead, some look and load like shit, and npm search has a low barrier for good code.

Me on rails, OTOH "ok, I need this thing", I google that and I swear to [-∞,+∞] I find GOOD packages, well designed, no cookie cutter bullshit, no obscure marketing shit on the README.md, it is very clear what this shit does, and the api is designed for HUMANS.
and it actually takes very little time to know if there's no such package.

I don't have to read dozens of fucking my-fuck-blog.io (jesus christ, the io domain has become such a fucking joke, it got fucking abused to death, there are some cool sites out there using it, but my god, James H. Marketing likes to just absorb everything he can, and the internet was not going to be a fucking exception)

does all of this make sense?

This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.

For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.

For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.

This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.

Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.

Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.

Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.

Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.

But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.

My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

So I just used Google analytics data from my sites to reverse stalk someone who google stalked me today. I got a whole bunch of information including their mobile model, their city and bunch of other data to confirm they did actually stalk me and understand their psychology.

Backstory: I had deactivated my instagram a couple of weeks ago account without any notice. It was the best decision I made this year. I feel more focused and found myself with plenty of time which otherwise I would have spend on lusting over those sexy ig girls.

Thought nobody would even notice or care. But apparently this one girl, my 2020 covid long distance lover whom I haven't talked to in over 8 months noticed it and decided to Google me.

She spent over 25 mins on my main site and also somehow managed to discover my dead travel blog from Google. I was thinking that I did a good job with the pseudonym I used for the travel blog. Apparently that's not the case!

She must've then proceeded to my linkedin account listed on the site and then sent me a connection request. That was then the notification popped up in my phone earlier today and made me feel butterflies in my stomach. I hadn't felt those butterfly feeling ever since I figured out that we can't be together or possibly even meet for once in real life.

I was curious how she found my linkedin and why sent me the request. We are not even in a related work field, same country. I never thought I'd be thinking more than 5 secs over a linkedin connection request.

That's what lead me to check out the Google analytics data to find the chronology of the events that lead to this connection request.

Anyways, it warmed my heart to learn that she still remembers me after all these months and that she bothered to Google me. Maybe she worried if I blocked her in ig? Or maybe she wondered if I lost my life in the recent covid wave?..

I wanted her to think that I was dead by not responding to the linkedin connection request. But it is possible that she checked out my GitHub profile and found my recent activities.

It fucking sucks knowing that I might never meet her in real life. If we meet, I worry it will lead us to doing things that might hurt others.

I guess at least I can die knowing that there was some truth in our love and someone cared about me and that it was not some illusion I felt..

Maybe the least I can do for her is to just accept that connection request.

I hate AMP sites so much. Fuck you Google! I'm not living in some third world country, nor do I use a decade old smartphone. And even if so, it's none of your fucking business what I do with my bandwidth!!

Just give me the real website, instead of downgraded shit!!

Came to know about deepin OS on devrant yesterday
Tried it just few moment ago. It's the most beautiful OS I had ever seen. But ...
There is hell lot of issues. Except for the top sites like google, facebook linkedin github, no other page or site is opening. Browser just stops by saying "site can't be reached". Also these sites are loading slower than usual.
Even internet is unaccessible from terminal. Apt-get install just stops at "getting headers 0%"

Please help

Every time I search for some CSS or Javascript feature the first three or four results are always from w3schools. I want MDN! Any good tricks or sites that does not involve searching directly on MDN? Some Google filter add-on perhaps?

For some reason GMail removes the Inbox label to some mails (usually receipts or communications from shopping sites) so sometimes I miss important mail and not realise until days later when I go "why the fuck is there no update?" I removed all filters and disconnected all services from accessing Gmail

Does anyone else have this issue?

So anyway... Finally got pissed of enough to build an IMAP program that looks are all Unread emails (with no labels) in All Mail and then moved them to the Inbox.

Part of me is wondering is this a test? Does Google like pissing me off to see what I'll do about it?

I fucking hate Google, but made the decision to use it as my primary search engine once again.

Reality dictates that I have already adopted it for well over a decade via searches since AllTheWeb existed along with owning enough Android devices to choke a twelve headed dragon whore.

But, here's the main reason: You.com and DuckDuckGo are so dumb as fuck, they might as well be Ron Jeremy's MySpace page.

You.com, for instance, is "completely customizable" by adding un-customizable "apps" without any control over the content it spews into your SERPS.

Neither seems to have interest in no longer padding results with shit you'd take a knife to. At least Google allows me to block those pages or sites from being seen again.

If you happen to live on Planet Earth (which currently seems to exclude 86.8% of the human population) you've been tracked before you even knew what "Big Brother" meant.

If you're looking to safeguard your security, buy a goddamn sword and time travel to remove the Zuckerberg timeline from existence.

Note: I posted this as a comment, but figured it could be a rant on its own.

I absolutely hate what frameworks like Bootstrap did for the web. True, 10 or 20 years ago quick personal / pet project sites looked plain and boring, and only sites with dedicated developers had a nice layout. But what did Bootstrap bring? Those "minimal effort" sites still look boring as fuck, except now they have Bootstrap look & feel. What's even worse is that thanks to Bootstrap, every fucking UI kit is just Bootstrap with more bloat. To further prove my point, if you google "material CSS" you'll find a ton of projects, and except for the official Google projects, they all look & feel like a mutilated incest child of Bootstrap and MD because instead of making their own implementations, everyone just started with Bootstrap. And the same goes for all sorts of templates which look & feel nothing like Bootstrap, but thanks to its shitty influence devs still start with Bootstrap instead of writing clean CSS which does what a template needs without extra bloat.

The popups on websites pisses me off.

If you try to google something quickly and enter various websites you have to close all popups on each site you enter.

Some websites try to make these popups more discreet by making them small and putting them at the bottom of the screen but then your brain just ignore them and focus on the small content above them.

In the year of 2022 people visit a lot of sites during a day. The human brain is programmed to put in as little work as possible to reach a certain goal so therefor everyone ignores popups.

I know its a law to inform people about cookies etc. But isnt there a better way?

Shame on Apple to use AngularJS on their iTunes Connect developer portal.... and probably other sites.
Today I discover that while inspecting the source code in search of an element that might have been hidden or missing and to my surprise I saw angular code in it !! WHATTT? !! shame on Apple... the links of the iTuneConnect still mention WebObjects (a Java based web-building framework that was never adopted by the mass) but the client code has Angular on it. How is it possible that they did not try to come up with their own framework for web applications ? They started the entire web-widget html/Javascript adventure, promoting modular web component and what not to then adopt a Google made framework ?! . No wonder they are syncing again. :D ... of course I am just runting... I love you Apple.

School decided to shut down their WiFi for "security" reasons (Everyone used a VPN and they were dumb fucks at networking, blocking sites like Google for having an invalid SSL certificate).

Now I'm forced to use my mobile data to keep using my Arch Linux laptop D:

My Boss Abuses me, should I leave my job?

I overheard this tidbit on a bus recently. Okay I'm lying. But in the great spans of
time I've spent reading "dear annie" type articles, many involving how often my meth head step dads beat me while growing up, or in turn how often *I* beat me (oh yeah)..I've come across this in one form another, this, and other dumbfuck questions from the stuttering meek and halfhearted.

They say there are no dumb questions. Well, like that guy who smoked too much weed and
asked "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" (fap fap fap), there are in fact dumb questions.The world is overflowing with them, like a clogged shitter full of tacobell and glitter covered brown gutter wisdom. And it smells like roses, if roses smelled like shit.

Questions like "How do I make sure my cats don't feel lonely once I have my first child?"

I don't know, they're fucking cats. Did you even google this before asking?

Or

"How to make spaghetti?"

Really, is this question written by a bot?

"What is the best javascript framework in year x?"

All of them and none of them. Welcome to hell.

"Whats your favorite color?"

My answer: I'm not five years old any more. And obviously you are. Why are you on this site instead of eating crayons at daycare?

Yes indeed, this and many more dumbfuck questions await you and can be found on the preeminent quora, amongst other sites.
A place, which censored an eminently reasonable answer of mine (I was totally not being a shithead btw).
I responded in kind by removing a whole mess of long form answers of mine.

What I have learned from the experience is this: Humanity is greatly comprised of many people who, having no brains to speak of, wander aimlessly like beasts of the field, glass eyed and slack jawed, in search of a savior. But their savior came a long time ago, once, and many times before. An engineer, or programmer, or perhaps in another reincarnation a guy parting a sea of koolaid after the local ruler swindled his peeps out of another payment for moving some heavy ass stone blocks, but I digress.

And in response to peoples worries, anxieties, everyday problems and concerns, every one of these would be wiseman, every one of these saviors, leaders, and great men spoke these magic words which resonate now down through the ages like the voice of reason and providence:

"Read the FUCKING manual."

"And don't bother me again asshole." (well this last bit is all me, but I'm sure others said it too.)

In the mid-2010s, we barely had any apps in our native language and popular coupon and review sites were lackluster in our neck of the woods.
So me and some old uni colleagues got together to make a WhatsApp based "wtf is going on right now and right around here"
think Groupon meets yelp meets Google maps meet trending topics. The idea was that local business would post deals and events and people would comment on it giving stars on real time, with geolocation. So you could see what was going on right next to you, and business owners only needed WhatsApp installed to post new topics.

We... failed to go viral. That simple. Things get frustrating when infinite no-questions-asked venture capital is not available.

Then me and the other founders got very lucrative jobs in former British colonies and that was it.

This idea might still work nowadays, but it would be reeeealy hard to navigate around Whatsapp's terms of service.
Good luck to anyone who might want to try.

Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.

There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

Go to compare two technologies. Ask google.
What do I get?

saashub
stackshare.io
slant.co/
g2.com/compare

Fuckign comparison sites, first 4-5 results, practically the whole damn first page.
And all their 'comparisons' are autogenerated masturbation or something keyed in by interns at yet another worth-fuck-all tech startup.

Googles search engine is fucking garbage too.
This is Advertising taken to the level of mental pollution.

Fucking assholes.

ATLAST THEY REMOVED THE NEXT BUTTON!
I have read it so many times that 90% of Google users never click the next page button and thought , that's completely true, even I don't do that. Why don't they remove it?Nice philosophical move, Google.

Although , to think about it,i guess they are smartly hiding a trick to respond back on the site-priority accusations : "No , we are not moving the local sites to later pages while featuring in the Google search(than the ones who are paying us hefty loads of for ad-money, or say amazon). You see, their is no 'next' page. They are all there on your screen. Just get a 30 inch long screen and you will see them all. "

:|

I repeat
Make google (or any other search engine) your best best friend.
Understand the art of asking questions.
Dont be ashamed of asking most of the developers no matter the experience still ask questions thats how people succed.
Make some projects .
use sites like hackerrank.
Learn utilise make.

f**king stupid google, go f**king eat s**t. We are using .dev for develop domain in our company, and all of a suddent we can’t access our dev sites anymore, WTF. Bulls**t!!!!

Why in the fuck can't you transfer a domain name for 60 fucking days? This makes no sense. My dumbass purchased a domain from Google Domains and registered it with Google Sites. Now I just realized that Google Sites is useless as fuck. It's more useless than a plastic bag of dicks. The dust on my window seal serve more purpose on this planet than Google Sites. That's how useless Google Sites is. Now I want to switch to Square Space or host it myself but have to wait 60 fucking days.

I could just buy a new domain for 12 bucks but I had the perfect name. Fuck ICANN for their stupid idiotic pointless motherfucking policy. Fuck.

Either a really big coincidence, or I'm officially creeped out.

I've been looking into buying a vps, so researching that a lot. Then today, I went to work, at a monitoring station, so we have to use remote desktops to access anything other than very specific sites.

Then I looked at an article about c#, and there was a Google ad, about a vps.. Keep in my mind, I'm at work, on a remote desktop, that gets cleared every time it's closed.

I know a vps isn't the most unpopular thing, but haven't seen an ad for it before.

I recently volunteered to be the admin of our student website. Boy was I in for a ride... I can only imagine the conversation went something like this:

IT: previous IT
P: some person

P: we need some additional sites that are unrelated to the main site, where should I put the files?
IT: just put them inside the folder that has the files of the main site, it doesn't matter.

P: we have some sub-domains that we do not use anymore, what do we do with them?
IT: just delete the files, don't bother with deleting the subdomain

P: we are having an event, what do we use to store user applications, we used google forms previously and it worked just fine.
IT: we will have the applications go to our mySQL database, but everything will be in one table so that it's more readable.

I mean I'm still a college student so there might be some deeper meaning to this, but still i can't look at this without my ocd getting the better of me.

Do you know why PHP will survive? Here is my observation.

Most of my clients who wants helps have their sites either on Wordpress or Magento or other free PHP cms.

The background is, they install the whole site all by them self and by the end of month, the Wordpress dashboard is loaded with massive plugins and yellow / red warning messages.

Same case with Magento and other CMS alike.

There site get heavy and they realized that they are in deep shit.

Just like some people take medicine all by them-self or by doing google. Until things gets into serious trouble.

and so the conclusion php will survive.
love to hear opinions on that.

Just posted this in another thread, but i think you'll all like it too:

I once had a dev who was allowing his site elements to be embedded everywhere in the world (intentional) and it was vulnerable to clickjacking (not intentional). I told him to restrict frame origin and then implement a whitelist.

My man comes back a month later with this issue of someone in google sites not being able to embed the element. GOOGLE FUCKING SITES!!!!! I didnt even know that shit existed! So natually i go through all the extremely in depth and nuanced explanations first: we start looking at web traffic logs and find out that its not the google site name thats trying to access the element, but one of google's web crawler-type things. Whatever. Whitelist that url. Nothing.

Another weird thing was the way that google sites referenced the iframe was a copy of it stored in a google subsite???? Something like "googleusercontent.com" instead of the actual site we were referencing. Whatever. Whitelisted it. Nothing.

We even looked at other solutions like opening the whitelist completely for a span of time to test to see if we could get it to work without the whitelist, as the dev was convinced that the whitelist was the issue. It STILL didnt work!

Because of this development i got more frustrated because this wasnt tested beforehand, and finally asked the question: do other web template sites have this issue like squarespace or wix?

Nope. Just google sites.

We concluded its not an issue with the whitelist, but merely an issue with either google sites or the way the webapp is designed, but considering it works on LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE i am unsure that the latter is the answer.

Fuck, I always thought writing websites for Internet Explorer was hard. But have you ever tried to escape Facebook Messenger's dark mode?! That shit is wild. Completely ignoring any settings specifically targeting dark mode and instead fucking up the entire color scheme. Even google, apple and other simple black and white sites are getting ass raped by this shit. WTF.

Is it all worth it? We feel its freedom, We feel it's just me and my phone or my PC. Is it? Is it that private? That camera you have ​on your phone, what if someone is watching you right now? That microphone you have, what if someone is listening to you right now? Those stuffs you Google, Those sites you visit, you're tracked, you're tapped. Ohh Incognito, Good Luck, there's no such thing called Incognito. Is it all worth it? In fact you're getting so much out of it. Is it all worth it? Or Am I just too obsessed? Is this Internet really that free?

It's freedom but you're compelled to use. Its freedom!
#internet_vibes

How to manage privacy and online presence?

I've seen the privacy advocacy making its rounds around here lately. The concept of hiding as much info as possible is something I'd like to try, but on the other hand I do want to maintain social media and have an outer presence. Additionally, I do want to use some Google services even if I do move my email (mostly developer related things).

I try and be a fairly social person alongside my introverted dev life, so this has been my dilemma the past few days. I could move to those obscure open source social media sites but that defeats the purpose of being connected with the non-tech people in my life.

Anyone having success with google sites(Sities.google.com)?
I needed a resume page, so used google sites to create one (I know nothing about web dev) .

Now they are giving me an ugly url when i try to publish it. I remember my friends having .github.io url when they make websites using html/css which looks decent .

So how can i move this google site to git repo? i can't see any html/css code here, only the site

There are sites that list different datasets, this makes them dataset of datasets.
As there are multiple of these sites, and they are listed on Google, that made Google dataset of dataset datasets.

So I've been a developer at my current job for about 12 years. I am the most senior level developer at my job. Let me state that I am a backend developer although I did frontend development off and on as well for the first 5 years of my career. However I have done no major frontend development for around 7 years now.

Effectively our frontend developer of 6/7 years just left.

We had an existing project in the queue and my boss expected me to do frontend development for this project which I did just to help out, but I am not getting any extra pay for this and I absolutely hate doing it. The only thing I was paid for was I overtime for completing the project quicker. With that being said I feel like I should be paid substantially more since I am doing double work and since they are not paying for a frontend developer. I'm literally doing her job and doing a better job than she did mistake wise doing her job.

Additionally many things have changed over the past 6/7 years and they have it in their minds since I did it in the past it should be the same now which isn't the case. So there are things in my project queue right now for future projects that they think I know how to do and I don't. It isn't that I couldn't eventually figure it out. It is just that I have zero desire to learn it .I just absolutely hate styling websites.

I'm ok with doing minor frontend things for projects but not entire websites

I literally develop the backend off all the sites we build setup Google tag manger tags/triggers, Google analytics, search console, Google looker studio, dns, site updates, manage all out Linux servers, do seo for content and sites. I can't handle something else on my plate. I'm currently having to rewrite a ton of code as well due to upgrades for our sites.

How do I respectfully tell my boss I refuse to do frontend work going forward or pay me substantially more on another project and that he needs to hire someone else without damaging our relationship?

I like my boss and my coworkers as people a lot outside of work, but I feel like I'm being taken advantage of financially and I'm honestly tired of it. As a developer for 12 years I'm honestly ready to just go elsewhere.

Assuming Mac: Alfred for OS such as searching and opening apps, using spaces to setup smart project areas, divvy app to quickly size and move around the windows, terminal shortcuts to open files in the OS or in an editor, transmit for hidden files and dragging between panes and server + occasional mounting for preprocessing, inbox-zero mentality, a properly setup google drive app so you don't email forked files back and fourth, beanstalk for deployment of larger stacks, surge.sh for targeted front-end sites, Ember CLI or brunch for build pipelines, CodePen for UI experiments outside of the project, slack instead of email, pick up the telephone and just call for clarification more often, stylus is easier to maintain then scss, hire designers that actually know what their job is if you can. For arduous WordPress administration, rightclick open in new tab for everything - or half your time will be pushing the back button, wp-migrate pro, and in general try to get out of WP when you can.

I always have multiple accounts thanks to Single-Sign-On, so I don't find my event tickets, logins, and contacts. To make it worse, those sites regularly log me out for no reason and some force logging in using my Google account although I have a main account with my business email address.

I suspect that's another deceptive pattern that they let happen on purpose so they can claim to have more users than they really have.

Is there a way to get devRant for android without google play?

Sites as APK mirror normally have all free apps, but I see devRant is missing. And I dont see any other legitimate source which might have the apk.

The new UK law for data sharing with the governments is crazy with making it law for service providers to hold data of browsing history and big sites like google, facebook so on to retain human readable access to there data is they offer a service to the UK, what steps do we take to protect the data, service but also follow this law I can't see anything that would make any sense to be able to follow this law.

What are your views and ideas going forward, at the moment the UK as made it law even tho the EU said stop this madness, so lets take it as red its there, is there sense-able way to do this or are we going to have to provide UK users data a means to be back doored?

One of the reasons why I wanted to become a software developer is because I see so many products or services taking the easy way out, at the cost of killing customer expectations. For example, I was told about JobTrack.io, which is supposed to help manage job searching by keeping track of applications and their statuses. But almost as quickly as I was told, my mind goes into automatic promise defense mode. And rightfully so, because the service turned out to be almost as monotaneous as the job search itself! Not as seamless as I'd need it to be to get started right away.

Now, maybe there's a slight chance I don't know wtf I'm talking about here. But, what's stopping this product from using an email client that runs server side, to interface with the user's main inbox, to run sentiment analysis on emails for detecting job application submissions? Such functionality would obviously need permission from the end user, so there are no surprises that some 3rd party app is sorta kinda monitoring your emails. And of course measures should be taken to avoid detecting anything beyond the contextual lines of: "Thank you for applying to so and so", or "We've recieved your application! Next steps".

Present those detections to the user to confirm. And do the same thing for rejections and offers. Shouldn't be that hard especially when most sites these days allow you to sign in with Google, and that Google marks these particular emails as "Important"; which further filters the detection process, and partially does JobTrack's job for them.

Honestly, I think the app has promise, and hope this is just a case of starting off small.

Was about to post a pic of my mobile sites certificate from Google, and then I realized that my real name would be revealed to possible co-workers who might use this app.
Whew!!!!! Dodged a bullet.

yesterday i worked a bit on my sites, checked again today to find them slow af. checked for flaws and recursions, did not find any. google page speed insights were totally fine. then i tried with my mobile connection and it was really fast. wtf vodafone?!

(speedcheck for dsl was fine)

I feel searching for documentation of things is getting difficult day by day. The actual documentation sites get very low page ranks and they end-up on 2nd or 3rd page of search results, while all the first page search results are links to articles filled Google Ads everywhere. If you search for say Apache Hive String Functions, you will get 10 different websites talking about Hive String functions, and the actual documentation site is on Page 2. For less popular tools, the page rank can be even lower.

On top of this, none of those 10 articles have and reference link to the actual documentation page in case you read the article and want to just quickly glance at the actual documentation which is the source of truth.

Ok. I GIVE UP! ...for at least a couple hours...

I'm not a big believer in... well anything suitable to the literal definition of believe. But there's only so much 'wtf? How is this even possible?' and any answer u can come up with is nearly statistically impossible...

I am a neuro-atypical (and just extremely atypical even if i somehkw was neurotypical) being, based on logic, finely calculated statistical probability and the most raw data and as unbiased as realistically possible, algorithms and interpretation (usually recursive pattern recognition with several highly detailed historical sources.

...but at some point statistical improbability and a collation of separate, yet relatively closely occuring events/circumstances makes logic, itself a primary suspect of corruption.

What was the breaking point that caused me to (temporarily) give up and tell logic to f off for a bit cuz maybe the illogical and mythical is the real logic, leaving me in a losing battle with 'the' fates?

Trying to get all my sourcing/purchase orders in/paid for/on the literal boats b4 end of the workday/week in china...
1st, had to drop a supplier cuz they have limited reps. When the one ive had 7+ years left, i got the aloof blonde girl societal trope of a rep... who for the 2nd time (despite the several very blunt complaints above her, incl me) she sent out a promotional update to the entire client list (ie, inherently competitors) as CC not BCC... over 200 business email accounts with tailored info of their sourcing.

2- totally diff company/ industry a former rep i was glad be rid of apparently just sfarted back for "awhile" as i needrf to restock/scale...apparently she forgot everything we discussed at length... lke if you want a chance on my business im not gonna be wasting time looking through your gui "mini store to then inquire about everything individually insead of a simple spreadsheet(which i print and put in a 3-ring binder rotating current catalogues in the same format i require everywhere)

3.dog was an ahole, my packed schedule got delayed and morphed.. a bunch of little bs thatd normally have no extra thought impact, hyperfocused forgetting one of my alarms til i realised my idiopathic fever was back and i didnt take/apply meds (pain/muscle relaxers mainly so despite this odd free time and needing to shower. I gotta sit on my rear, leg elevated/non-productive far 40min b4 i can shower (as functional legs and lack of syncope is almost a req to shower)

4. A new-ish rep of a company/factory i like/respect enough to not mention in relation... he makes invoice 1.. slight error thst was easily resolved...#2 was flawless... he goes to officially generate the contract(alibaba... verrrry simple with lots of extra explanation buttons). Price and all items match, its near workweek end so i was waiting for it so i could quickly pay/have it on the boat b4 it left and few fdav days are behind...

I put in card info, get to the 2 cbeck boxes (imo should be only 1 but whatever) asking if billing address is same ss delivery(its always default yes)... then i see a few lines in chinese (i can read enough for business negotiations... typical words/sentences innately look different than things like individual letters/address and postal indicators.) After a few loops of double checking, mentally trying to dismiss my i Intial judgement cuz it'd be too ridiculous... even resorted to google .... nope... initial wtf was spot on... recipient name/address was indeed the company(multi factory producer)i was purchasing a wholesale, via sea freight, bulk of products from.

Im pretty sure the system would've flagged it as an invalid contract within an hr... but seriously... ive been handling alibaba (and other) international sourcing since before high school(mainly small businesses i made sites/little tools for that found anything with a light up screen intimidating) and a purchase then shipment to the originating company/factory actually entered into a contract(the form is sooo simple)... im faced with ridiculously improbable obstacles actually existing and changing in such nonsensical statistically improbable ways so often that 1. I wouldn't trust a dr (or most humans) that didnt 1st assume i was crazy of some form...unfortunately im not, despite hkw much simpler and probable itd be 2. Id be super suspicious/converned if statistic norms were my norm for over a day.

But seriously wtf???

Someone give me some wisps of a frame of ref here... where's a typical 'fuck this, im out!' Breaking point?

I have an issue that I just can't shake and wondered if anyone had any insight.

I'm currently working for a company that is going through a ruff patch when it comes to google rankings dropping off.

I'm the developer who is rebuilding his sites, I've told him that his site is very flat as in no content and he need to start writing articles within his industry.

No buying strength at all just a catalogue of products categorised.

But the guy doesn't get it and insists in spending money on PPC Google shopping which gets him a 83% bounce rate.

I keep going on and on at him how he is doing to much advertising and not enough content marketing but he just doesn't get it.

What would you do ?.

Incoming phone call from an unknown number. I am busy coding, the number is not in my contacts, and there is no caller ID. Callers could leave a message on my voice box, but most don't. Callers could send me an email or a short message, but most don't. When I google their number, there is either no entry at all, or one of those generic reverse phone book sites called something like "look who's calling" telling me that it's a German number of an unknown ower. I don't get it.
If making outbound cold calls is your profession, why won't you use any of those free trust-building options? Are those people getting paid just for typing numbers into their keyboard and listening to the ring tone?

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)