Internet

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. 😞

Background image not appearing on mobile devices

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Spent some time trying to figure out why the background image on my site’s home page was not being displayed on mobile devices although it was appearing in a desktop browser. There are, of course, endless solutions that may or may not have worked for someone in the past. They suggested tweaking your CSS coding or adjusting the size of the image or some other voodoo. None of these worked for me.

What worked for me was simply ensuring that the image’s colour profile was set to sRGB. Once that was changed everything worked as expected.

Artificial nonsense

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As if navigating the nonsense produced by the erroneously named Artificial Intelligence, which spews out all manner of silliness and even scarier stuff, was not tricky enough we should not neglect the human generated nonsense.

On a recent visit to HMS Victory a guide informed Martine that after evacuating their bowels sailors would pull up a rope that was being towed in the water on the end of which was attached a rag with which they could clean their rear ends. The rag would then be draped back into the sea to be cleaned as it was towed along – hence the term Tow Rag. It makes for a good story but is utter nonsense. And yet…. it has now become a thing. An actual thing. There are even videos with actual tow rags

a man on board a ship pulling a tow rag on a rope from the water.

If such a thing was used at all why would they call it a tow rag? Would they not have a more colourful name for it?

The OED has no Tow Rag and Chambers suggests you may have meant Toe Rag – which of course you did because that is an actual thing – hence the popular view of Boris Johnson…