Introducing Surf Mode!
Now that the directory contains more than 300 websites, I wanted a simple way for you to visit them all, like browsing vinyl records at a record store.
This first iteration is basic: each time you surf a website, it is chosen randomly from the directory. Therefore, it is very likely that you will stumble upon the same website multiple times.
Also, there are restrictions that makes it impossible for me to use all websites of the directory:
- Some websites don't want to be embedded. They will return the HTTP header
X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy
(not yet supported) with values indicating they want to opt-out. I read those
values and flag them to not be included in Surf Mode.- Some websites are served via
http instead of https.
The Wild Wild Web is served via https, which triggers a
mixed content warning in some browsers when the iframe is mounted.
Many browsers will even block this behavior.
I decided to keep it simple and to not include http websites
in Surf Mode.Finally, I also manually curate the websites that appear in Surf Mode, as they need to display well on desktop and mobile. However, I am taking an approach where, by default, if I did not flag the website as ugly in iframe, they will be part of the experience.
For the second iteration, I want to focus on giving each website a fair chance to be discovered. I will replace the very random algorithm for an algorithm that ensure you visit each website in a round robin manner.
If you have ideas to enhance the experience, let me know in the guestbook.