Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I have a fairly semantic layout, all my reviews have metadata, and stuff like that - but I'm not…
Continue reading →
I'm grateful that my blog posts attract lots of engaged, funny, and challenging comments. But any popular post also attracts spammers. I use Antispam Bee to automatically eradicate a couple of hundred crappy comments per day. Nevertheless, some get through. Here's a particularly pernicious one - it appeared as three comments ostensibly in reply to each other. At first glance these look like …
Continue reading →
Yes, I know the cliché that bloggers are always blogging about blogging! I like semantics. It tickles that part of my delicious meaty brain that longs for structure. Semantics are good for computers and humans. Computers can easily understand the structure of the data, humans can use tools like screen-readers to extract the data they're interested in. In HTML, there are three main ways to …
Continue reading →
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle, but the joy of the web is that there are no…
Continue reading →
WordPress does not respect an admin's preferred date format. Here's how the admin list of posts looks to me: I don't want it to look like that. I want it in RFC3339 format. I know what you're thinking, just change the default date display - but that only seems to work in some areas of WordPress. It doesn't change the column-date format. Here's what mine is set to: So that doesn't work. …
Continue reading →
I love ripping off good ideas from other people's blogs. I was reading Alvaro Graves-Fuenzalida's blog when I saw this nifty little force-directed graph: When zoomed in, it shows the relation between posts and tags. In this case, I can see that the posts about Small Gods and Pyramids both share the tags of Discworld, Fantasy, and Book Review. But only Small Gods has the tag of Religion. …
Continue reading →
I take great delight in seeing people reply to my blog posts. I use WebMentions to collect replies from social media and other sites. But which of my posts has the most comments? Here's a snipped to stick in your functions.php file. It allows you to add ?comment-order to any WordPress URl and have the posts with the most comments on top. // Add ordering by comments add_action( 'pre_get_posts', …
Continue reading →
Why do so many vastly-wealthy tech personalities go mad? My ideal job involves being employed by a millionaire tech-bro. Just before they get on stage, or moments before they file a lawsuit, or an instant before they publish their thought leadership - I will appear to them. I will be dressed in rags, body smeared with excrement, weeping sores blotching my face. I will sidle up to them, lean…
Continue reading →
I've written over 3,000 blog posts throughout the years. This blog has become a repository of my thoughts, feelings, experiments, hopes, and creations. It has also become outdated, buggy, and suffers from link-rot. So, every day, I tend to my digital garden. I go in to old posts and check that the links are still pointing somewhere relevant. Are the embeds still live or do they need replacing? …
Continue reading →
I logged into Twitter using a fresh account last week. No followers, no preferences set. The default experience was an unending slurry of racism and porn. I don't care to use Twitter any more. Whatever good that was there is now drowned in a cess-pit of violent filth. I still have a lot of Tweets embedded on this blog. Using WordPress, it was easy to paste in a link and have it converted to an…
Continue reading →
(Inspired by this conversation between Jukesie and Himal) Lots of companies encourage their staff to blog. It's free PR! It makes them look like they're on the cutting edge of technology! It helps with recruitment! It can also be a corporate nightmare. What if the developer says something stupid? What if it accidentally reveals something top secret? What if the CEO doesn't like it? And so,…
Continue reading →
If you explore this blog's archives, you'll see that I've been blogging continuously every day since the start of 2020. Before that, I was blogging every month since mid-2008. Today, I am very hungover. Although I usually write a bunch of posts a few days and weeks in advance, I find myself looking at my publishing calendar and seeing it blissfully empty. Part of the reason I blog is that I…
Continue reading →
