From January 3, blog traffic went well down

Around January 3, the regular traffic to each blog post fell off a cliff here. Either my posts have suddenly become a bore and not worth reading, or something else external has happened. Is Feedburner dead? Is it because my Twitter account is locked (by me, a few weeks ago)? Is it the death of […]

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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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De-Googling didn’t start in 2013

Usual funny stuff from Wikipedia, this time on de-Googling.     If they’re Wikipedia’s “first”, then I beat the lot of them, and I wasn’t even the first to use this term. From 2010:     There’s a whole series of posts from 2010 where I deal with this—surely it was obvious to anyone in […]

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Targets painted, opposition misses again

Our government’s response to COVID-19 has been better than many nations’, but it is far from perfect, as Ian Powell points out in a well reasoned blog post, and in his article for Business Desk. It’s backed up by a piece by Marc Daalder for Newsroom. To me, Powell’s piece makes a great deal of […]

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On Cantonese, for Te Papa’s Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project

  What a real honour to promote my reo! Thank you, Dr Grace Gassin and Te Papa for spearheading the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project and for this incredible third instalment, where I get to speak and promote Cantonese!    Obviously I couldn’t say anything earlier, especially during Chinese Language Week, but I am extremely […]

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Farewell, Twitter gadget (is there a point to them?)

  One good thing to having Twitter lock Lucire’s account: there’s no point having a Twitter gadget or widget on your home page any more. Was there ever one to begin with? I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a site and found a Twitter widget useful.    It did bother me that a Lucire […]

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My first tech post in a while: how I use my social-computing time

Refreshingly, I’ve noticed that my more recent blog posts haven’t been about Big Tech as often. I haven’t changed my views: the ones I’ve stated earlier still stand, and Google and Facebook in particular continue to be a blight on democracy and even individual mental health.    A lot of the posts were inspired by […]

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Another innocent post at NewTumbl that’s too much for the moderators

Even though I like NewTumbl, it’s never a pleasure to be proved right again about its user-based moderating process, where there is no appeal. Alex at NewTumbl, who empathized with my situation, says this is the latest one to fall foul of the Republic of Gilead user base—and which would have had a pass at […]

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All you need is one NewTumbl user to undo management goodwill

This is a comment (with my reply, in reverse chronology) from a NewTumbl user, Thewonderfulo, who often posts about the site’s rating system. I’ve no idea if it’s official, but it certainly passes itself off as authoritative.    I usually find myself agreeing with them but here’s a prime example where I don’t—because, first, I […]

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