A real downer of a post from Michael Lewis of searchmysite.net. He reports that Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots. On some days, no human used his search engine. I regret that I am one of those absent humans.

What to do?

One thing I could do mysel...

Further to my own prediction, a deliberate excerpt is not the reason for my feeds failing to validate. Nope, it is a dastardly invisible character, as pointed out by Jan Boddez in a comment. This problem has bitten me before, and I always forget it. It would be very cool if I could automagically test for the presence of this kind of stuff; StackOverflow suggests that iconv --from-code=UTF-8 would do the needful, so that could be something, especially if I can trigger something like that when I save a new blog post.

Prompted by Maggie Appleton’s recent update to her post on Daily Notes Pages, I was fondly remembering a time when I had a teeny little script that appended a single line of text to a kind of log. At the time, I noted that I didn’t want to go back to, say, Day One to do that, and even after I ha...

Today’s on-this-day post took me back to the heady days of 2004, when this weblog was baked to order by Tinderbox and the RSS feed it generated proved to be invalid. I guess I solved it eventually but that post prompted me to check again today. And once again, it does not validate, not RSS nor Atom.

🔙🟩

Stupid 127 1/1/2

Very happy indeed to have met the challenge I set myself yesterday, of programming help to solve the Stupid Word Game invented by Colin Devroe. It annoyed me that my guess could be correct, in that it used all the letters and a chosen mystery letter, but still wrong if it...