For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]
Tag: 2022
Duck Duck Go is probably scared of Mojeek
Duck Duck Go serving a page after using the !lucire bang. The second result is a frameset that has not been linked to in over two decades, a sign of Bing being a Wayback Machine. As some of you know, I used Duck Duck Go as my principal search engine between 2010 and 2022, […]
Losing your number-two position when switching to HTTPS, 31 months on
In 2022, when the Jack Yan & Associates site went to HTTPS—though some parts of it were on that even in the 2000s—it fell from being second place in Google to below 30th for a search for my name. However, the accepted wisdom was that HTTPS sites outranked HTTP ones on Google. The “experts” all […]
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‘A highly pleasurable read’—another positive review for Panos: My Life, My Odyssey
I must have been pretty busy in July 2022 not to have read this review properly. I remember it coming in—it’s from The Bite, a London-based magazine—and thinking, ‘That’s great, it’s positive, add that to the files,’ but it really deserves a bit of a highlight here. Jada Brookes (a nom de plume for […]
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The captivating case of Brian MacKinnon
On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]
The IBM Selectric version of Univers revived
This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt. A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even […]
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‘Google … broke the web’
Nice to see I’m not the only one who sees Google for what it is today. Warning: coarse language. What’s bizarre is a reply I wrote largely in agreement (and had a few likes to) has vanished. Maybe some Google lovers didn’t like what I wrote? Sometimes I can make the point better […]
A format so old, it’s new and radical
Above: I spy Natasha Lyonne and a Plymouth Barracuda. So the car is part of her screen identity? So it should be, it’s television. I might have to watch this. Two very fascinating responses come up in Wired’s interview with director Rian Johnson on the Netflix release of his film Glass Onion. I’m not […]
Here’s hoping Yuzo Related Posts v. 6 does the trick
When we put our sites on a new server last year, one Wordpress plug-in we retained, despite a known exploit, was Yuzo Related Posts. Basically, nothing else could do related posts as well. It just worked. Everything else, inexplicably, either did not do post relationships terribly well, was too resource-heavy, or was too ugly, Fortunately, […]
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Beware AI; the dangers of Google ads; and the beauty of Radio.garden
Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedin’s The Next Big Idea: • AI is the first technology that can take power away from us • if we are not careful, AI […]
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