AI blogging podcast tts · 16 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~260 times
Listen to this blog post in your browser: Download MP3 audio. Powered by Amazon Polly. I've noticed an interesting trend on some of the blogs I follow. More of them - though by no means the majority - are including audio versions of the content. The usually look something like this: or The ones which have this are mostly using commercial Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines.…
Continue reading →blogging meta · 2 comments · 400 words
At the start of 2020, for some strange reason, I decided to publish a new blog post every single day of the year. And, a third of the way through that, COVID struck. In a way, it was good for my motivation. I didn't have any fun and exciting trips to go on - so I had plenty of free time. But there's only so long you can stare at four walls while your friends are sick and dying, without going out …
Continue reading →blogging meta WordPress · 3 comments · 250 words · Viewed ~209 times
The WordPress app for Android prompted me to add a story! This is a new and experimental feature. Sadly, it isn't very good. Here's how it works. There's a brief description and some aspirational screenshots. There's a basic image picker. Then you get some basic tools to add text on top of your image. I know I'm a cynic, but this is a little underwhelming. It just posts an image to the…
Continue reading →blogging meta · 2 comments · 700 words · Viewed ~658 times
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. Scammers registering date-based domain names A venture into the arcane mysteries of programming …
Continue reading →blogging meta · 6 comments · 1,150 words · Viewed ~292 times
Every year, I take part in NaBloPoMo the Judoon mating festival where people blog every day in November. I ended November 2019 with more blog posts than I knew what to do with, so I tried blogging every day in January. And then, well, February is only a short month, isn't it? If all has gone to plan, you're reading this at the end of 2020 and this is my 366th blog post! Fucking leap years, eh? …
Continue reading →blogging mms sms twitter vodafone · 7 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~493 times
A curio from the archives. Waaaaaay back in 2003, I was working at Vodafone on their graduate training scheme. One of their fancy new ideas was a crowd-sourced employee suggestion box for new business proposals. As an eager young grad I submitted dozens of ideas. Most of them were crap. But, as I looked back over them, this one struck me as being a lot less crap than others. Terence Eden is on…
Continue reading →blogging hack NaBloPoMo rss WordPress · 500 words · Viewed ~232 times
Just me scratching my own itch. I want to create an RSS feed of all the blog posts which I'd published on this day in the past. For example, if today is 21st of November 2016 then this plugin will show blog posts written on 2015-11-21 2014-11-21 2013-11-21 And so on. You can view a demo at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/on-this-day/ Code The code is pretty simple. The WordPress API is fairly …
Continue reading →blogging NaBloPoMo · 3 comments · 250 words
In the good ol' days of blogging, when your blogpost was mentioned on another site, you would receive a "pingback". A sort of meta-comment you could display which said "So-and-so's blog has linked here." It enabled you to see who was driving traffic to you, if a "big name" had noticed you, and gave your readers a sense of where the conversation was continuing. Of course, it occaisionally got…
Continue reading →blogging meta stats · 50 words
It's only a silly number - and not a very accurate one - but it makes me happy. Thank you for reading - it has truly been my pleasure to write for you. …
Continue reading →blogging meta svbtle · 1 comment · 250 words
(Hopefully the last naval gazing post of the year...) I asked if using a WordPress theme to emulate the Svbtle theme was unethical. The results were mixed - you can see some of the discussion on HackerNews and AppDotNet. Broadly speaking, people fell into four categories. People who had never heard of Svbtle and didn't see a problem with using a similar theme. People who had heard of …
Continue reading →blogging meta svbtle WordPress · 19 comments · 650 words · Viewed ~10,805 times
For the last few months, I've been using the WordPress theme wp-svbtle. Even with my limited design sense, I think it looks rather spiffy. Recently though, I've had a few people on HackerNews and Twitter criticising me of "ripping off" Svbtle and accusing me of trying to defraud readers into thinking I was part of the Svbtle network. While nothing could be further from the truth, I think an…
Continue reading →blogging Liz meta NaBloPoMo stats · 800 words
Well. That was an intense NaBloPoMo! I published a blog post every day in November - as I have for the last few years - but this was unlike anything that went before. I had over 50,000 viewers in a single day due to one of my posts, got hit by reddit and HackerNews, and even got asked to do some paid blogging! I started this month hoping to average 1,000 page views per day. This was so I…
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