How to accidentally DDOS yourself

We had some performance issues last week. Entirely of our own making but not in the usual way. We nearly DDOS ourselves by sending out emails. We do a lot of analysis in Energy Sparks and, to be honest, some of it needs optimising. Tickets are in the backlog and we are exploring solutions. Anyway, … Continue reading How to accidentally DDOS yourself →

I made a Downpour…game?

I've been playing with Downpour recently. It's a lot of fun. You could explain what Downpour is by comparing it to something like Hypercard. By combining text, images with some basic interactivity you can create little packages of hypertext that you can publish for anyone to use. You could also explain Downpour as a tool … Continue reading I made a Downpour…game? →

About / Ideas / Now

I think I discovered this project via Steve Messer, so hat tip to him if so. Or even if not, as he's a nice guy. aboutideasnow.com is a neat idea to index personal websites and specifically three pages: /about - which is about how people see themselves and a look at the past /now - … Continue reading About / Ideas / Now →

Downloading items from a custom list on the Internet Archive

This is a quick blog post to remind me how to do something in future. I've written before about how to download magazines from the Internet Archive and make gifs from their covers. In that post I used the Internet Archive command-line tool to download items from a Collection. I recently discovered that you can … Continue reading Downloading items from a custom list on the Internet Archive →

I’m not the Leigh Dodds you’re looking for. Maybe

Did you know that dots don't matter in gmail addresses? your.name@gmail.com is the same email address as yourname@gmail.com I'm guessing most people don't because — in my experience at least — that's not how other email systems typically work. It's obviously caused enough confusion that Google had to write an FAQ about it. Anyway this … Continue reading I’m not the Leigh Dodds you’re looking for. Maybe →

Will AI hamper our ability to crawl the web for useful data?

As websites start to block Common Crawl, and as the project leans in to its role in training LLMs, will it become harder to use data from the web for other purposes?

How I use my RSS reader

Some notes about how I use my RSS reader to find and read interesting stuff on the web.

Norming on Mastodon

Reminding myself that in order to build norms we need to share them. Those "preachy" posts on Mastodon are an essential part of doing that.

The struggle for readability

Adverts and search engines have massively impacted the ways in which we read online. I don't just mean how we find things to read, but impacts on how we read and the quality of reading online. Adverts make content worse in many different ways Even simple banner adverts add visual clutter to a page. Pop-ups, … Continue reading The struggle for readability →

Prompting

My feed is full of screenshots of AI generated images made using Midjourney and DALL-E. I've seen Kermit the frog in, well, everything and Foucault on a swing. Creative prompt engineering can lead to some interesting results. And because interesting results leads to clicks which lead to revenue, then engineering interesting prompts will be a … Continue reading Prompting →