So farewell WordPress

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Like so much of the web these days WordPress has ceased to be fun/interesting having become evermore skewed towards the money makers it offers little for the non-developer/techy individual. I gave up with their JetPack nonsense last year and have now moved the whole thing to ClassicPress which reverts the everything back to when it was fun/interesting. This provides for the opportunity to endlessly tweak this and that until, inevitably, the whole thing breaks and you have to start again.

The conversion process was well thought out, informative and easy to follow. Not all themes and plugins are supported but there are more than enough for my simple needs. As yet I have not found where to change the colour of the blog’s title but it must be in here somewhere….

Bing Bong

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Intrigued by the variation in search results from Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo I created a very specific page about the building of the breakwater at Rhos on Sea in 1983.

Sure enough searching for some combination of those words with Google my page will be at, or near, the top. Take that UK Gov!

Screenshot of Google search results showing duncanmoran.net as first result above gov.uk site

Alas Bing does not find it at all. Even after jumping through the BingSiteAuth.xml hoops.

Copilot offered to help:

Screenshot of conversation with Bing's Copilot asking for images from Duncan Moran which Copilot fails to find.

Perhaps a more general enquiry:

Screenshot of conversation with Copilot asking if Duncan Moran has a web site which Copilot is unable to locate.

It is called Duncan Moran dot Net. It should not be that hard to find. Perhaps if I was on LinkedIn….

As Molly White recently quipped we are witnessing what many of us think about as “the web” rotting right in front of our eyes. 😞

Noise Toys – Summery

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There was once something akin to Droplets on early iPads but I can find no trace of it now.

You add taps across the top and bars (tuned by their length) beneath. The flow of drips from the taps can be adjusted by rotating the tap.

With an array of options from setting a scale to tweaking the built in synth or sending midi out to other instruments it is both useful and fun.

For endless tweaking Stacks may satisfy. Following on from Strokes it is a sequencer/looper/granulator thingy. Currently in an early release version with several features ‘coming soon’.

More noise you say then obviously SoundDust’s Hobbes is what you are looking for.

With which you can Ooof and Doof to your heart’s content – or just click all the dmoRan options…

But for some serious randomness the Eclore player provides pieces that play in Reaktor and can be remixed to provide countless variations.

The web of nonsense

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As the developers and techy people continue to drive everyone else from the web and into the welcoming arms of the social media silos so they can have the web all to themselves – because they are so special/precious; let us take a look at some of their quality work.

Now the Torso Electronics T-1 is an actual thing. And it is fair to say that my ever expanding, increasingly saggy, aged torso could do with some improvement but this is just silly….

One can barely imagine the excitement and sense of satisfaction that was generated by the creation of this slidey uppy button thingy…

 

ADD TO BAG it shouts. It could have said ‘Add to my bag’ but no that would be taking things too far. But who has a bag large enough to contain a sofa? Alas there is nothing to actually put into your bag as it will take two or three weeks to deliver your purchase. You are only ordering it.

Ho-hum.