Best of: What I blogged about in 2020
This is a quick round-up of the blogs which "did numbers" this year - and a few which I feel were cruelly overlooked. I posted a new blog every day in 2020 - so don't be surprised if you missed a few. OK? Here we go!
January
Watch out; there's a scam about. People love sharing horror stories.
A venture into the arcane mysteries of programming
A nice security report to Google but, sadly, no bounty.
February
Lots of people loved this guide - although I need to find a new use for the screen now I'm no longer commuting.
A few months after I posted this rant, Google fixed their long-neglected 2FA app
A runaway success - pointing out a privacy flaw with Facebook
March
I helped make access to the NHS websites free for UK mobile users. Which was nice.
You can now access most NHS services from your mobile, with no data charges.
In awe of the team who pulled this together very quickly. https://t.co/ogLzCc8z97— Terence Eden (@edent) March 18, 2020
April
I get annoyed at Twitter accounts which dupe people into followign them by pretending to be someone famous.
Trolling MacOS users always gets lots of hits. Thankfully I don't use a Macbook any more.
April
This caught the imagination of some - there's a lot of interesting celeb-spotting in the historial record
May
I loved building this silly idea - and I even sold some too!
New blog post!
I've built a physical <blink> tag!https://t.co/qD0VwG0gsg
Please forgive me 😁 pic.twitter.com/a7BjPXmBFJ— Terence Eden (@edent) May 21, 2020
June
Ranting about technology - always a cathartic favourite.
Similarly, pointing out the pendulous nature of technology gets people excited.
July
I watched every episode of 90s sitcom Frasier so you don't have to.
It's really important to show people how easy it is to fact-check for themselves.
August
I bought a record player!
I bought the shortest domain name possible and used it for XSS!
Buying a single character domain – and 3 character FQDN – for £15
September
I built a Walkman which plays albums from floppy disk.
I built some art made of floppies.
I didn't get a lot of jobs. Some people found this reassuring.
I got angry with Cloudflare for doing a crappy GDPR job.
October
More tech grumps
Google are particularly inept sometimes.
This experiment caught the imagination of lots of people. Ironically, it stressed my server so much that I ended it early.
November
Pondering the future of computing.
I love Doctor Who - and I was overjoyed that someone contributed a phone that I'd COMPLETELY missed!
December
Noodling about with footnotes.
Me getting into a bit of a strop and throwing my toys out of the pram.
Thanks for reading!
I'm probably going to take a short blogging hiatus. So thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing.
Mike says:
I was looking at this post in Chrome on iOS and when I went to open one of the links in a new tab I found I can't. Usually a long press on a link brings up a menu with an option to "open in new tab", but for all the links in this post the menu only offers "open". Even after inspecting the HTML on a proper computer I can't work out why. I thought it might be the presence of target="_top" on the a elements but I've made a basic webpage to test if the issue was the presence of target attribute or the value of the attribute but that test didn't replicate the behaviour so only made me more puzzled. The "open in new tab" option still exists, as it is presented for every other link I've tried including in your other blog posts. The issue doesn't occur with Chrome on Android. I can't find anyone else talking about the issue. Very odd.
@edent says:
The WordPress OEmbed code inserts iFrames. So it might be that?