For Micro Monday I recommend you follow @smokey.

WOOT!  I just joined the WordPress IndieWeb Webring, which is for Wordpress users with Indieweb powered sites.  Part of the webring revival.

Thanks to Greg McVerry for help with HTML.

Google’s latest European Union woes could mean opportunity knocks for app developers stymied by contracts that pre-install the U.S. giant’s own services on Android phones and tablets, according to analysts and companies.

This could be huge not just for other search engines but also browser developers, email providers, maps, etc.  Google monopoly has in effect smothered all competition on these fronts. Nobody can gain any traction.  It’s time.

Source: Growing vegetables in Containers - A life in the forest of dean with a what’s on section

Some great container gardening ideas and tips.  I might try this someday.

This is a really well done list of privacy respecting search engines. Lists those that exist but also defines terms and lists upcoming engines.  Recommended.

Source: Alternative Search Engines That Respect Your Privacy | 12Bytes.org

After much discussion I came up with a new blogroll. Ta da!

Not perfect but a bit easier to maintain.  I used the Links Shortcode plugin to resurrect the “Links” function in Wordpress and let me put the links on a Page rather than a Widget.  I still have not fully figured out the formatting for the links lists but I got the core: clickable links, a description automatically arranged in alphabetical order.  Good enough.

I borrowed a lot of suggestions from Chris Aldrich.  Even though I didn’t use it, I like his use of the term “Following” page.  I think it fits better.  I stuck with “blogroll” because that’s what I’m used to.  I used a different plugin to resurrect the Links function but it gets the job done.  I copied his menu taxonomy and made my Blogroll Page a sub-page under “About”, not to hide it but to to personalize it and show ownership of it - that it is my list and should be equated with me.

Now I’m free to add blogs to the roll, so It will grow.

Website publishers have been incentivised to do exactly the opposite of what could have made the web so great.

How the Web went so - wrong. Good read.

Wow, that was some rabbit hole I went down last night.

Background:  About a week or so ago I tried to join the Indie Web Ring.  But I just got error messages.  Nothing explaining why my site caused errors, just the error message.  This caused some frustration on my part since I had nearly the entire suite of Indieweb plugins installed, I was sending and receiving webmentions, was it Wordpress, plugins, SemPress or something on the web ring’s end?  (Thanks here to Greg McVerry for offering to help diagnose problem.)

I decided to procrastinate.  In the meantime I found a validator and was getting mixed signals: my webmentions were good but maybe problems with identity but no solid diagnosis.

Then the IndieAuthor plugin updated several times and I suspected that maybe my identity problems might get better.  Worth a try.

Now: So last night I tried to join the Indie Web Ring again.  It worked!  I was informed I was in, given a code.  Plus I got cool emoji identifiers:  I had to squint but I was pretty sure it was a castle and a - something.  I finally figured out I could highlight emoji, rightclick, search and Duckduckgo told me what they were: a castle (yes!) and an 8 pointed asterisk (cool, not a snowflake).

Right. Now to paste said code into a widget.  WARNING: Either WordPress or SemPress theme, really, really, does not like emoji.  I locked up that widget tighter than a drum.  I couldn’t even delete the emoji laden ring code.  Bad Things were happening.  I deleted the widget.

Found alternative code using hexadecimal equivalents for WordPress.  Decided to stay away from widgets.  Found header/footer plugin. Install on WP.  Hex code, does not crash. Won’t validate on webring site because I have to customize it to identify my site.  Search for hexadecimal code for castle and 8 pointed asterisk (not snowflake). There are forty bazillion emoji. Can find Unicode but no Hex.  Find Unicode to Hex converter. No clue how to use it.  Help for the converter sends me to Github.  Sigh.  Not sure of syntax to put two emoji Hex codes together even if I had found them.

Now I have a choice: I’m in a footer NOT a goddamn widget, do I try the original emoji laden ring code, that crashed the widget, in the footer and risk locking up the entire WP install if WP does not like it or do something else?  Computer starts pinging: battery critical.  “Pull up! Pull up.”  That’s it, it A Sign.  There’s a time to attack and a time to retreat.  Beaten by Wordpress it was time to retreat and rebuild.  The whole blog is not worth risking for a webring.

Affair over, torn apart by mutual incompatibility.  But I’ll always remember, last night, the neat castle and the eight pointed asterisk (not snowflake.)

Last night I took some time to play around with the Mojeek.com search engine.  It’s UK based, small compared to the Big Boys, and respects your privacy.

What makes Mojeek different from other privacy search engines is tat it uses it’s own index.  Yes, they actually crawl the Web with their own spider and algorithm rather than replying on Google or Bing for the backbone of their results.  Unique is an over used word but it applies here and that deserves some respect.

Looking at the search results:

1. Results were relevant to the keywords I was searching for.  No oddball pages totally off topic. Good.
2. The search results looked so different from Bing or Google’s first three pages. Everybody tries to clone Google’s search results. Mojeek is not doing that. Part of this is because they have a smaller index and they results will improve when they get larger.  What I realized was the results I was getting looked more like page 4+ results on Google.  This is not a bad thing.  I found a good looking blog directory on Mojeek results that is buried on page 5+ on the other search engines.  This can be handy for deep research.
3. Nice integration of Wikipedia.
4. Good News page and search.  I might start using this.
5. They are actively spidering. Ramblinggit is only about a month old and they have one or two of my posts indexed.

Edit Added:

Mojeek.co.uk is the UK version of Mojeek.  The UK Mojeek may have a larger index than the .com, which makes sense for a UK based engine.

NEW: You can now read my full review of Mojeek.

Bookmarked: Foundations of a Tiny Directory

Two things hit me straight off: 1. I love the analogy of comparing a tiny directory to a Tiny Library.  It works.  2. tiny little curated directories on blogs are a way, if done right, of taking back the Web. Search engines are an essential tool, but we must keep in mind that when using a search engine we are helicoptering in to links on a topic.  A tiny directory is more personal, like Word of Mouth recommendation.

7/12/2018 Flash

Feh. Apparently there are no good blogroll plugins for Wordpress.   I did look extensively through the WP plugins directory but didn’t find anything interesting. Most plugins were way out of date for my version of WP.

Might be an opportunity there for the Indieweb movement to aid discovery.

I just added a small link directory using this plugin.  I’m using the free version of the plugin which is not bad although very few features in makes a decent one page directory.  Now that I know how to use it I can add URL’s fairly quickly.

Why?

1. Half the fun of the Web is exploring the Web.  In the 1990’s we called these pages “Links” and we found our way around by surfing the web.
2. I wanted a place for links to things I like.  The blogroll is for people so this is for websites and stuff.
3. I guess I have not fully gotten curating links out of my system.
4. It needed to be more permanent than a blog post but easier to manage than a static html page.
5. I’ll eventually add to it, this is good for a start.
6. RamblingGit is my web presence and where you link to says something about me, my interests and what I find important.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good blogroll plugin for WordPress?

I’ve looked at Indieweb blogroll solutions and there are some really good implementations.  I really like Colin Walker’s directory of people who have commented via webmention.  It would be great to aid blog discovery and be automated like that at the same time.

However, I just don’t have the skills to be messing with things like editing php.  So, it needs to be a WP plugin.

I thought of adapting a WP links directory plugin but I’m hoping to find a dedicated blogroll plugin before I try that.

Anybody got a recommendation?

Do you hear the jackboots on the pavement yet?

Okay, I’m still on my webring hobby horse.

Of all the ring hosts, the now defunct Bomis was the most different.  A Bomis ring owner didn’t have to wait for webmasters to apply to join the ring.  The ring owner could just add sites he/she found relevant. Navigation was by IFrame so a site did not need to have a ringcode on it.  In effect, it made the Bomis ring owner a mini directory editor.  One could make some pretty cool rings with Bomis.  If I remember right you could even search the ring from Bomis.

The important thing is not Bomis, but the way you could catalog the web with Bomis. This is an idea that may have some merit today for things like blog discovery.

The down side was the ringcodes from Bomis (for those sites that applied to be added) were as plain-jane as a white washing machine. IOW, boring at a time when cool ringcodes were big and gaudy. Not having ringcodes on every site made it hard to attract new members to a ring.  Plus Bomis had a slightly naughty reputation of being a place for bikini babes and then over time got even more naughty, which turned a lot of people off.

Still, without Bomis there would be no Wikipedia.

I like the idea of the h-card.  But, it seems, that if you include your email address there is nothing to keep it from being harvested by bots for spam.  Unless email harvester bots have gone away, it is going to remain a problem.

In Reply to Kicks Condor Cataloging Horror Fiction.

Track Expired Links: Many directory scripts had a bad link checker but that really didn’t work well.  Basically you had to go through the directory categories and subcategories manually and get rid of dead wood.  Now I was in a “hobby and fan” niche so a lot of sites listed were static sites on Geocities, Tripod or other free host.  (Blogs, on Blogger and Wordpress.com, were new and didn’t have Pages yet) Surprisingly the free hosted sites were more stable than sites on their own domains.  Webmasters on free hosts might abandon their site but they left them up and Geocities didn’t delete so even without updates their existing essays and info were still good.  Sites on their own domains: would either go dark or get snapped up by the p*rn industry and go p*rn.  We did have a way for users to report bad links but only a few went to the trouble.  So clearing out dead wood was a time consuming chore and part of what I mean when I talk about difficulties of getting directories to “scale”.

Updates: No way to know really.  On the Horror search engine I had the spider reindex the Index page every few months so changes made there would eventually show up.

Wikis as replacement for Directory: No and sorta.  A directory is about navigating the Web.  The job of a directory is to get rid of the searcher by helping them find what they want as quickly as possible.  You are sending people off to a primary source.  A wiki is about providing information and if it links out, that is a secondary function.  Take Wikipedia as an example: Wikipedia (which I use daily) is a silo.  It’s just not a commercial silo.  Wikipedia has filled the vacuum left by the closure of free hosts like Geocities.  Before Wikipedia the experts were all building pages about their areas of expertise either on free tilde pages from their ISP or university or on GeoCities and the like, now they are editing Wikipedia pages.  Then Google intentionally filtered out free hosted sites, so it fell to niche directories and webrings to help free sites get found, then the plug got pulled and Geocites went dark.  But that is how we found information before Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is a mixed blessing.  It provides a needed service - free, but it also smothers out many small informational sites from being created (unless they can contain more useful detail than Wikipedia.) It’s more efficient, but lacks funkiness and fun.

Blogs can act as curated directories. I have a small experimental one. But they really can’t do it as well as a directory even though they might aid in discovery they are improvisations.

Webrings are like taking a subcategory and adding navigation between like sites in that subcategory.

Crawler:  Having a real crawler that you control is like having the secret decoder ring!  Even if you can’t see all the uses right now, you will quickly find all sorts of new uses and utility.  You can detect bad links, changed content, who they are linking too, etc.

Moderation: yeah I hate to say it but you will eventually need it.  I closed down many of my directories partly because they were obsolete but partly because those old directory scripts did not have spam protection.  They got spammed out by submit bots.  It got to be too much work deleting out hundreds of spam Add URL’s each week from the review cue.  Right now you are flying under the radar and the Indieweb movement is small, but once both your directory and the Indieweb blips up on the screen the spammers will come.

As you have pointed out, directories are still around us: Yelp, yellow pages, Craig’s List, eBay, Amazon etc are all directories.

Directories can exist without a hierarchy.  The now defunct Searchking “search engine” was really just a linear directory.  You submitted each page of a site (no crawler) you wrote a title, description and 10 keywords (Tags?) and your page was instantly findable in the index.  That was okay in the early days of the Web when sites were static and small.

Your experiments are going to be a lot of fun.  The technology has changed from my day and that will work in your favor.  I can’t help with coding, that’s above my pay grade, but if you have any questions keep asking, I be happy to tell you what I can.

I used to read a lot of murder mysteries.  As a lad I started with The Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock mysteries for young readers and graduated to Agatha Christie with Sherlock Homes and some Hard Boiled detectives mixed in.

I’ve always been fond of the cozy mystery, no gore, gallons of tea, isolated manor houses, villages, poisoned vicars, and generally a pretty good puzzle to solve.

What I don’t like are some modern cozies that have gotten insipidly cute:

Romance novels masquerading as mysteries. All that yearning, flirting, mushy stuff just gets in the way of murder. A little stoic interest in the opposite sex goes a long way.  A lot of modern detective series have started out alright (ie. J.K. Rowling’s) but have become over romanced by book three. What is it with the romance stuff?

Cats, dogs, tortoises, etc. being the detective.  Enough said.

Cozies laden with dessert recipes: flans, crumpets, cakes, cookies, pies (I like pies just not plopped down between finding corpses). Doilies too.

Most of the above seem to be written by American authors.  British cosy mysteries seem to keep closer to the traditional cozy model.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  I’ve read some modern humorous cozies that were lots of fun. I’ve read some early ebook cozies from very very small publishers that were  well written, so there is good stuff out there.  I think what we need are some subcategories to separate the more traditional cozy from the cat mysteries.

For Micro Monday I recommend following @kitt

Self-doubt seems to put a damper on blogging. The only thing to do is blog through it.

Search engine optimization as we all should know is only one aspect of Web marketing, which itself is only one aspect of marketing. Marketing can be described as the process of identifying and sati…

The whole article is good, thoughtful.  What caught my eye was the observations about webrings.  This addresses the question of scale of any one given ring and the sweet spot in terms of numbers of members in the webring.  Recommended reading.

Personally I don’t think those sweet spot numbers will change even for modern webring management code because human behavior hasn’t really changed.

I feel a vacuum cleaner post coming on.  No, really, about old school vacuum cleaners.  🤓

What the heck, I’m in. 😀  Kicks, I’m real interested in what you cook up.  Best of luck to you!

In Reply to Kicks Condor: Let Me Link to You

I love Micro.blog and I love the Duckduckgo (DDG) search engine.  If you have a Micro.blog hosted blog, some of the themes (last I looked) had a site search box powered by DDG.  I had one for a few months.

Site search is important on a blog.  What I found was DDG was taking quite a long time to index any pages on my Micro.blog blog.  This kinda made the site search unusable.  So the answer is to get DDG to index more.

Somewhere along the line I ran across this:

How to get indexed on DuckDuckGo if you’re running a smaller website

Even though that article is a few years old, it seems to dovetail with something I saw when testing DDG site search on more established blogs, when I kept noticing some mention about Yandex.com on the Duckduckgo search results pages.

What you are going to do is:

1. Go to Yandex.com and register for Webmaster Tools.  (This is similar to Google or Bing’s Webmaster tools.
2. Submit your site to Yandex using the webmaster tools.

The carpenter finished rescreening the screened porch yesterday, so today I need to paint while the weather holds.  Git er done, so I can cross this project off the list.