This comparison by designer Alexander Singh of the development of the web from home pages to massive content farms like Facebook with the development of agriculture really got some of the ol’ neurons firing.Over the pa

Source: @eli, here.

I’m going to focus on Micro.blog hosted blogs, but these three providers will work for Wordpress too.

Recently, Micro.blog added the ability to add HTML code in the footer area of your hosted blog.  This is great for things like webrings.  It’s also good for JavaScript code so I immediately added a web traffic stats counter.

Why analytics?  As a webmaster I still think it important to have an idea of where your visitors are coming from, how they find you, what posts they are interested in, and are they using a phone or computer.

There are three that I looked at:

Statcounter.com - the free service is generous for most blogs.  The stats are not super detailed like the others but they are sufficient for me.  Statcounter offers 4 advantages: 1. the free service is decent, 2. they offer a version of the code to put on your site that is compatible with just about every CMS platform out there plus instructions, 3. near real-time reporting, 4. You can see what your stats are very quickly.  I’m using Statcounter.

Yandex Metrica - Russian search engine Yandex offers free hosted stats that are considered equal to or maybe better than the same offering from Google.  And I repeat, it’s free.  Yandex is straightforward about it, they are in the business of indexing the web and offering analytics helps them find new URL’s and do their job.  Hence it’s free.  If you want detailed stats and good graphs I suggest trying Yandex.

Google Analytics - this is the Big Boy on the block and outside of looking at your server logs this GA has been the gold standard for many websites and bloggers.  With that said, I don’t recommend Google Analytics: 1. Google is voracious on mining data on websites and individuals I’m just not going to hand them the inside data on any of my websites on a silver platter,  2. I have used them in the past and GA can cause some serious slowdowns on your site’s page loading times, 3. when I used them the data was not real time, there was always a lag.

No remotely hosted analytics service is going to detect or report all web traffic to your site only server logs will do that.  For bloggers these services are good enough.

Bookmarked: For the list of uses for Micro.blog.  Chris Aldrich wrote the list as part of a reply/response to a link he was saving.

Need to keep up with the most recent posts from your favorite sites and blogs? Try one of these top online RSS readers!

I was thinking of writing a guide for people wanting to quit Facebook and it occurred to me one really needs to start with a rss reader. Okay so that’s one of many steps.

Niche directories are not dead!

Bookmarked: Microcast.club.

Microcast.club is a directory of microcasts, or short-form podcasts, created to help you discover new and interesting microcasts!

I’ve got these two domains: ramblinggit.com (here) and rantinggit.com (now a Micro.blog (MB) hosted blog).  Both represent me.  Both post to Micro.blog.  I guess that makes me the “Git”. 😐

Brief History of rantinggit.com:  I started it on Wordpress.com as a reaction to the crazies on Facebook.  Later I just quit reading FB and so a lot of my desire to rant about things disappeared.  I decided to move the domain and contents to MB and use it for quicker interaction with the MB social network.

Ramblinggit.com with it’s more extensive support for on-page comments and web mentions, will be used for long form posts and some micro posts: Like, Bookmark, Listen,  Quote, Read, etc.

Both blogs are linked together in their menus with redirects.  In Wordpress I used the Page Links To plugin.  On Micro.blog I followed Manton’s instructions.

Both blogs crosspost to Twitter.

I think this is going to work.

Straws made from sugar, wheat, bamboo and pasta are vying to replace the now-reviled plastic ones. But are any up to the task?

From the archives: Android is open—except for all the good parts.

When you read this you will know why the EU imposed sanctions on Google.

I have a Nokia 6.1 (US 2018) phone running AndroidOne. No complaints except the camera locks up every once in awhile, but I’m not a big camera user.

So I’m in my car, pulling out of my neighborhood onto a highway.  My phone is in my shirt pocket.  Suddenly the phone starts playing a sorta doo wop tune over the speaker, a tune I’d never heard before. Then it went to voice over, it was a commercial!  I know it said something about Google and maybe it said something about Wifi.  I, of course, was busy, fumbling, trying to get the phone out of my pocket. But I’m fricking driving on a highway. I manage to thumb the lock screen on and see some notification saying something like “Dave’s open wifi network” or words to that effect.  But I’m fricken driving so I can’t PIN unlock the phone.  Then the commercial is over, the speaker goes dead and the notification disappears from the lock screen.

WTF just happened?

That’s the first time something like that has ever happened to me.  The Nokia does have a FM radio receiver built in but I’ve never used it.  I got no repeat of the incident, in that area, on the way home.

I did a full antivirus scan and a full malware scan that evening, two different programs, neither found anything.

I’m just putting it down to the freakishness of radio waves - wifi is really just radio waves.  But it was strange.

You are a local town council.  You need to put in something like sidewalks or a new sewer or a trail.  So you apply to the Federal Government for a 80/20 grant. The state DOT needs to sign off on the proposal, so does the regional planning commission.  And it has to work it’s way through the Federal bureaucracy.  Sound familiar?

Nobody seems to be asking: Why is the Federal Government paying for sidewalks in Tinytown, Your state?  Why are we sending our tax dollars to Washington DC, only to have a portion doled out to some small town somewhere?  And in the meantime, everybody has a finger in the pie.

I’m not questioning the need for the sidewalk.  The local town officials know better about town needs than anyone.  What I am questioning is Washington being involved at all.  The truth is, the State ought to be providing the grant money for that sidewalk not the Feds.  Having the Feds do it is very inefficient.

This would mean that the State would have to raise taxes to start paying for local sidewalks. Theoretically then the Feds would lower taxes proportionately to compensate.  Right?  It should happen.  It could happen - in your dreams.

Once you create an entrenched bureaucracy,  in this case in Washington,  it will fight like heck to defend itself and it’s power.  But if you ever want to get the Fed’s out of micromanaging local affairs, this is where you have to start.

I’m trying to figure out how to have both a Micro.blog and Wordpress blog on different URL’s and have them link to each other via the Menu navigation.  Is there a way to put a redirect on a MB Page that would go to a different URL?

How are other Micro.bloggers handling this?  I looked through Help and the Wiki but didn’t really find anything.

Yesterday I started my 30 day test of Qwant search engine as my default search.  I did a few test searches and generally liked the results.  Then I started on my due diligence: looking up Qwant’s privacy policy, about, press releases, features each opening in new tabs.  Then I needed to search for something.

Bang. I got a nice captcha thingy saying they detected unusually high activity from my IP and I needed to prove I wasn’t a ‘bot or get banned.  Wow.  I’m a slow typist too.  The captcha was easy but tricky (I liked it.) but I didn’t like having my train of thought interrupted by an over sensitive robot detector.

Anyway, I’m still liking the results.  I’m still liking that Qwant is spidering the web with their own bot and using Bing for backfill.  Testing continues.

You’ve heard it a million times. You’ve probably blogged about it enough until you’re sick to your stomach. PageRank is based on citation statistics. Every document gets a “…

Quality: the thing that a human editor, particularly an expert human editor, can measure that Google cannot.

Vivaldi is my browser of choice for all my computers, Linux and Mac. (Sorry, I don’t have Windows, but I would use it on Win too.) It’s free.

Straight up, if you love minimalist browsers, Vivaldi might not be for you.  It’s a power users browser, it contains all the standard controls right onboard.  You can customize Vivaldi just about any way you want without addons.

Not surprising since Vivaldi was started by one of the same men that founded the original Opera browser.  Opera had the same feature rich philosophy until new owners went all minimalist and gutted Opera.

Stuff I like:

• Vivaldi uses Chromium, the open source version of the Chrome rendering engine. So basically you get Chrome without all the Google spyware.
• Most Chrome extensions work with Vivaldi just fine.  It gives you a big library of extensions to chose from.
• You can do so many things with tabs you really need to try it to believe it.  You can have a heck of a lot of tabs open at once with tab stacking.
• Lots of installed search engines to chose from. You can set two defaults: one search engine for regular browsing and a different one for private browsing windows if you want.  There are three privacy search engines available out of the box.
• Easy screenshots built right in so I don’t have to remember the command.
• A Start Page, these guys invented it when they did Opera and Vivaldi has it.

Extras:  Vivaldi has an active community.  Forums to request features, discuss uses. You can get a free basic blog, and you can get your own webmail account which integrates with the browser.  A word on the webmail: Vivaldi’s servers and headquarters are located in Iceland which has some of best laws to protect both privacy and free speech.  That is not by accident.  They don’t have to do this, but it’s a nice touch.

But, you say, Vivaldi is not open source!  Strictly speaking that is true.  But Vivaldi is assembled from mostly open source parts: Chromium rendering engine is open source, the UI is HTML 5, and there is a boatload of other open source stuff Vivaldi lists. Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari aren’t open source either.

Privacy: 1. Vivaldi contains no spyware, no ads. 2. Vivaldi does send anonymized crash reports back to Vivaldi but nobody can match them to you.  3. Vivaldi says they don’t track you nor do they give info to third parties. 4. Remember they are in Iceland, US Secret Warrants have no weight there, no US based company can say that.

I won’t use Google’s Chrome because of the privacy issues.  On Mac I chafe against Apple’s walled garden.  So, especially if you are a Google Chrome user, you should try Vivaldi.  It’s free and you have nothing to lose.  Even on the Mac where I like Safari, I still prefer Vivaldi.

Remember a decade or two ago when it was our national pastime to complain about email? More recently, as I’ve reassessed this blog, my social media presence, and our centralized digital platf…

He’s right.  We take email for granted, but it “just works”. Can’t do better than that.

Hat Tip: Colin Walker.

Wordstar was the second word processor I ever learned and used. Certainly the first I used in MS-DOS.  (The very first was Perfect Writer in CP/M.)  I always liked Wordstar but I think I replaced it with the DOS version of MS Word.

Bookmarked: WordTsar – A Wordstar clone

(The keyboard shown in the slide show, looks like it could be from my old Kaypro II CP/M computer, a Keytronics keyboard.  Wordstar was the most popular word processor in CP/M.)

Hat tip: Boingboing.

Breaking down the walls between the internet’s many social silos, Webmentions offer a new level of freedom for web interactions.

This explains it so clearly.

This was also posted to /en/indieweb.

Wiki plugin - potential uses. research needed.

Knowledge Base plugin - potential uses, better than wiki for me? research needed.

Start another webring - want to test webrings in 2018 with broader subject for, traffic, discovery.  Are webrings too passive? Is this worth the work?

Alt. Join an existing webring.

Non-blog:

Investigate neocities.

Our latest minor update includes the addition of the Qwant as a search option. Read more about our collaboration with the European search engine and get the latest version of Vivaldi below.

This bit caught my interest:

Most notably perhaps, is that Qwant is also the first European search engine that is building its own web indexing technology.

In reply to: Catalog of Internet Artist Clubs

Kicks!  Great find.  That is one of the best done websites I’ve seen in a long time.  I love the timeline bar graphs.

I’m beginning to think that the failure of early directories was that they were just piles of links with no sense of an editor or curator.

The Mining Co. was fantastic, but when they ditched the unpopular topics and became About.com they were not as good.  Still About was decent for awhile.

Anyway the model was each topic or subtopic had an expert guide they would write lots of different essays on their topic, link them all together, and at the bottom of each essay was a list of links to resources and other expert pages on the subject.

This was a sort of hybrid: not just a collection of links but not a wiki either. The bottleneck was finding experts and keeping them.  Wiki’s were developed partly in response to this bottleneck.

These sites were excellent starting points when you knew absolutely nothing about a topic but needed to learn.

Oh there’s just so much to say about the start of this thread, and it gives me so much hope for the open web as well as potential growth for WordPress.

Yes, the Link Manager should be resurrected.

I was checking out the webring stub on Indieweb.org and the list of hosts.  As of 7/18/2018 here is an update on the information on webring hosts.

1. Webring.org/rw - I tried to register. I get an error message “host unavailable” from my browser, when I fill out the form and click register.  Somebody might want to verify.  Could be temporary.
2. Ringsurf - I tried to register.  Registration form has captcha  asking to fill in the code.  Only it gives no code.  Lots of things broken on that site, general state of disrepair and the “Marketing” pitch sends up warning signals in my opinion.
3. Webringo.com - this is the only webring host not listed on that page, and it’s the only one fully functioning. It’s old but everything works: registration, ring creation, admin.  Somebody might want to add them to that page.

Hopefully somebody will see this and confirm my observations and edit or something.

Despite my dislike and distrust of Google, I use an AndroidOne phone.  The EU’s ruling that Google Android violates EU antitrust laws is both welcome and disappointing since it is weaker than I would like.

But it still has the potential to open up Android on so many fronts:

Android Forks - example given Amazon’s FireOS

Search engine choice - this could be huge. Especially for regional/national/language specific search engines.  For instance, before Google the UK used to have dozens even hundreds of UK-specific and UK local search engines and directories. Most all died.  And, today it’s hard to gain any kind of traction for development of any type of search engine with Google locking down the market.  Ditto other markets like EU search, Germany, France or even smaller countries.

Maps - another huge area.

Email - along with other web services like Calendar, Photos, etc.

Browsers - again this could be a big boost if an OEM can make Firefox, Opera or others the default browser.

Still, we need more than just two mobile OS’s.  So I’m glad I’m getting a true Linux phone early in 2019.

I had all notifications from Mastodon turned off.  I just turned them on. Because? More and more people I know are finding me and more engagement from strangers on Mastodon. Twitter refugees?

Added a “Podcasts” category to my Blogroll page in addition to the blogs.  Not a lot there yet but these are the ones I listen to steady.