See your portfo………….lio? Thanks but no thanks.
Interweb
Developers are great – an ongoing series
Most of my school reports concluded that I ‘could do better’/’must try harder’. As we watch the web disintegrate around us daily those are the words that usually come to mind. It is not just the Enshittification but the careless amateurism of much of what appears on, supposedly, professionally developed sites. I assume that these are managed and overseen by someone competent but…
This is basic stuff. In lesson one you learn about Bubble sorts. Lesson two check for negative and zero values so you do not spew out nonsense like this.
Ms Reeves’ refund?
It seems unlikely that Rachel Reeves will assign some money from her forthcoming budget to refund the cost of videos I have purchased but can no longer access1 because of the government’s ridiculous nonsensical stupid Online Safety Act.
Perhaps someone should point out that their stupid act, far from saving us from the evils of pornography, allows the sites that are not asking for age verification to now bubble up to the top of the search results; or better still just explain what the Internet is and how it works.
1: This is not strictly true as the Vimeo app on Apple TV displays a QR code to verify your age but you can press the Back button and it takes you to your stuff anyway.
Crosser Country
Despite the crew’s best efforts and frequent apologies there is always a sense of excitement tinged with trepidation when one travels on a CrossCountry train. Will you actually arrive at your destination or will the train break down halfway? Will the train be so overcrowded that it should be condemned as a danger to life? Will there be an announcement that the train will not fully complete the journey and you need to sprint around the labyrinthian concourse of New Street to board another CrossCountry train which may (fingers crossed) get you home?
To reflect such abysmal service they have updated their app to one of those not-quite-an-app-not-quite-a-website abominations. It works exactly as you would expect. First you must change your password. Your new password, comprising a lengthy sequence of random characters, will be rejected if it does not contain a “special character” even if there is actually nothing special about those particular characters within a lengthy sequence of random characters. Helpful links are provided to show and hide your password. This, as they fail to explain, will do nothing if your cursor is not in the text box.
But once we have overcome such challenges we can finally log in to the shiny new app:
Ho-hum. Let the one star reviews begin:
Cautionary RSS decluttering
The other day Colin Walker posted about removing seemingly dead links from your RSS feed – a process I have done recently. But today I am reminded why this may be a problem when Rodrigo Constanzo shared an update about his splendid looking/sounding Data Knot:
His posts before today’s had been in May 2025 and September 2023 – so prune with caution or better still never throw anything away…
