Interweb

Personal outsider web sites

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In her defense of unpolished personal websites Ana Rodrigues opined:

all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code.

Splendid. Let’s take a look:

A page of dense code for a web site

Hmmm!

We should not forget that browsers will happily render a text file (someText.txt) and combined with a simple drag and drop access point like Transmit‘s Docksend it should be easy to be on the web. This was how things worked in the days of yore. Your account with an ISP came with some ‘web space’. The ISP account would put an icon on your desktop onto which you dragged your files and they automagically appeared on the web.

The punk rock scene in the UK of the late 1970s was a move against the self-indulgent, bloated excesses of established musicians and the music industry. Of course it did not last and the status quo was soon reestablished but there was a re-setting of attitudes. Perhaps one day the web will experience something similar and people will reclaim it as their own.

RIP WWW (an ongoing series)

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Although lacking links Heather Burns‘ enthusiasm for Station Eleven piqued my interest enough to search it out. The Wikipedia page for the TV series provides a link to the “Official Website” which reads

https://www.hbomax.com/station-eleven

alas clicking this link bounced me to

https://www.hbomax.com/geo-availability

Screenshot HBO Max not available in your region.

Why are you telling me this? Was I interested in HBO Max? Did I ask when it would be available in my region? Could you just tell me about Station Eleven?

Station Eleven is available to buy in my region from Apple TV or Amazon.

I suppose the HBO message was more informative than the usual blanket:

Sorry, content is not available

Where did it all go wrong?

Andy’s blog

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Alas Andy’s blog has been deleted.

Screen shot of Andy's blog home page for 18th Feb 2025

The Wayback Machine caught some of it up to 14th February. It had come in for a lot of criticism over the last few days but it was no worse than numerous other sites promoting some form of magical SEO nonsense.

It is nigh impossible to have a presence on the web these days without wrong assumptions being made about you and why you are here:

I have been a customer of theirs for over twenty years and have never had a business 🤷‍♂️.

Some of us are here simply because we find it interesting and/or fun. We are like Ivor Cutler who Paul McCartney described as occupying the quiet meandering backwaters and tributaries that fed in to the never-ending fast flow of the mainstream of the music world but into which he had no need to venture.

Others may happen upon my quiet meandering backwater but attracting crowds was never the point.

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. 😞

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.