blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin

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51/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Myth series has been on my radar for years, so when I saw the first five books at the local library sale a couple months ago, I snapped them up. This first one is…ehh. It’s okay. It’s not bad, but neither did it wow me. Maybe it’s because it’s the first in the series, maybe because it was written in ’78 and I’m reading it in ’24, maybe because I’m more of an SF reader, maybe it’s because I’ve fairly recently read the first few Discworld books and enjoyed them more than I did this, and maybe it’s some combination of all of those factors, but I was somewhat underwhelmed. As long as I have the next four, I’ll keep reading and see if they improve, though. (Also, why is Aahz about two feet taller than he should be on the cover art?)

Me holding Another Fine Myth

Reclaiming the Web

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Excellent article by Molly White looking back at what the web used to be and forward to how we could bring that back: We can have a different web.

As a lifelong lover of the web, it’s hard not to feel a little hopeless right now. […] It is tempting, amid all of this decay, to yearn for the good old days.

[…] Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

I’m just one (very small) corner of the ‘net, but I do what little I can to keep my site as clean as possible. No ads, no minimal trackers (EDIT: Huh…Ghostery is telling me I have two trackers on my site. I’ll look into that. I try not to have any, and I’m not sure where these are coming from.), not even any metrics (I have no idea how many — if any — visitors I get here). Like Molly and the people she mentions in the article (I voted in the Mastodon version of the poll that she screenshots), I miss the “good old days”. I hope there are enough other people who also do that we can reclaim some of that outside of the walls of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and others.

Or as Angus McIntyre said:

This excellent article by @molly0xfff reminded me of the sci-fi trope where everyone in the future lives in a domed bunker & gets told not to go outside because it’s a wasteland filled with Bad People.

Of course the protagonists leave the dome & find that the reality is a bit different: outside can be scary, but it’s not the hellscape they were told.

Big Tech walled gardens are the dome; outside them is a risky wonderland that’s ours for the taking.

Leave the dome.

New Page: Link Recommendations

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I’ve just added a new Link Recommendations page, inspired by @lori@hackers.town’s post:

…search is irreparably broken. Finding solid information about a topic is harder and harder. I think the only way we can fix this is to go back to relying on human curation.

The Yahoo model (not unique to Yahoo, but it’s a relatable example for people my age) was having a directory of websites based on topics. You go to the anime section, you get links to various anime websites. There wasn’t an infinite slop of fake blog results.

…my proposal was, and still is, simple. Do you have a personal website? Or just anywhere you can share some links? Make a page full of links to resources for things you care about. […] Then link to other people’s lists of links. […] Make a giant interconnected web of resources and get the word out in spaces you’re in for those topics that you’ve got a wealth of information gathered, and encourage others to do the same.

I’ve just started, so it’s far from finished (and as is often the case with these things, “finished” isn’t exactly a state ever likely to be reached), but it’s a start!

Searching for a Postalicious replacement

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Hey WordPress plugin people: Does anyone know of a working and supported plugin that does what Postalicious used to?

Ideally, I’d like to return to something I used to be able to do: post a daily “here’s what I found interesting today” roundup post. Way back when, I used del.icio.us to save links; those would get picked up by Postalicious, and once a day, they’d be aggregated into a single post (example from 2009 here).

Is there a similar plugin, or other known way (some sort of IFTTT integration, maybe?) to do such a thing? Conceptually, it seems rather simple, but I don’t know what bookmarking services have open APIs or other ways to hook in, and I don’t have the coding chops to create my own.

🧪 Test Post 21 of Several

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Test twenty-one of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • SOM post delay: 30 seconds.
  • Emoji in title: One (🧪).

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis (I wonder….)
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

🧪 Test Post 20 of Several

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Test twenty of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • SOM post delay: 30 seconds.
  • Emoji in title: One (🧪).

Me and two friends. Test image only.

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

Test Post 19 of Several

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Test nineteen of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • SOM post delay: 30 seconds.
  • Emoji in title: None.

Me and two friends. Test image only.

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

Test Post 18 of Several

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Test eighteen of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • Emoji in title: None.

Me and two friends. Test image only.

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

Spooky Season Redesign

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Just because I can, and I haven’t done anything like this in ages, I’ve given my blog a minor redesign for spooky season. Just color and font tweaks, nothing major, and this site is so low-traffic that I doubt many people other than me will notice, but hey — that’s okay too.

Screenshot of this blog, showing the design with pumpkin-y ornages and yellows, and headers using classic creepy fonts.

Enjoy spooky season, everyone! Less than a month until Goth Christmas! ;)

I’m Training AI Chat Bots (Non-Consensually)

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The Washington Post has published an article looking at the websites used to train “Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA.” If you scroll down far enough, there’s a section titled “Is your website training AI?” that lets you drop in a URL to see if it was scraped and included in the data set.

I checked three strings — “michaelhans” (to cover both this site and its prior address at michaelhanscom.com), “djwudi” (for my DJ’ing blog), and norwescon (which I’ve written or tweaked and edited much of the content for). All three of them are represented.

  • norwescon.org: 45k tokens, 0.00003% of all tokens, rank 528,147
  • michaelhanscom.com: 37k tokens, 0.00002% of all tokens, rank 635,948
  • djwudi.com: 3.7k tokens, 0.000002% of all tokens, rank 4,002,025

For the record, I’m not terribly excited about this. I’m also under no illusion that anything can be done; this stuff is all out on the open web, and as it’s free for actual people to browse through and read, it’s also free for bots to scrape and ingest into whatever databases they keep. Sometimes this is a good thing, for projects like the Internet Archive. Sometimes it’s unwittingly helping to train our new AI overlords.