turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef
I recently asked on Mastodon for tips on estimating your total number of RSS subscribers. It turns out it is rather easy to do. While I do have (privacy-aware) analytics for my site, this only tracks page views.
After upgrading to macOS Ventura, I decided to upgrade my Ruby version and ran into issues trying to build my site locally.
This is a follow-up to my previous post regarding my website getting de-indexed by Bing, and thus DuckDuckGo. (Sorry for the delay, I’ve been away.) It turns out that a number of sites were experiencing this issue, including my friend Jeff Johnson. While I do not have concrete data on how widespread the issue was, anecdotally it appears to have been a significant problem.
My website is still missing from DuckDuckGo’s and Bing’s search indexes. And now other sites are reporting similar issues.
I discovered earlier this week that my website is no longer being indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo. In fact, it appears that it has been deliberately removed from their search indexes. On Bing, rather than display a “no results” message, it displays a “Some results have been removed” message, which is very concerning. Notably, however, Google search is working fine.
I mostly avoid interacting with and discussing the world of NFTs and cryptocurrencies — it’s not for me. However, a couple of blog posts caught my attention recently and I highly recommend reading them.
As many of you know, this site is open source. Most of the time, this does not cause any trouble. But occasionally, it does.
Ever so often an iOS developer asks me how to get started with making their own blog or portfolio website. Or, I’ll see a software developer from another community on Twitter ask the same thing. Often they are earlier in their career, or unfamiliar with web development, or unsure whether to build from scratch or use a platform, or all of the above. I find myself consistently making the same recommendations to folks. For this post, I want to share what I think is a great approach to get started, and how you can dive deeper once you master the basics.
Periodically, I go back to add updates to older posts. I’ve been doing this for some time now, although not as often as I would like. I aspire to be as good and diligent as Michael Tsai, but that’s an incredibly high bar. (How does he do it?!)
Lately I’ve been upgrading and making improvements to my website and blog. As part of that work, I was updating and refining how my RSS feed gets generated with Jekyll. And then I realized something that I had not given much thought to previously. When including the full content of blog posts in an RSS feed, if you link to other posts or pages on your site should you be using absolute URLs or are relative URLs ok?
I’ve written about my web host before. I’ve used NearlyFreeSpeech.net for years. It’s very “bare bones”, very DIY, and very no-bullshit. I highly recommend them, especially if you only need to host a static site. It is so inexpensive you could say it’s nearly free.
Part of the joy of having a ‘bare bones’ DIY host is that sometimes you have to figure shit out on your own. I am not a great web developer, nor a Ruby expert. But, I learn more each time something breaks — you know, Type II fun. Most recently, I came to understand and fix a new error on my web server: env: ruby26: No such file or directory.
I removed Google Analytics on this site over two years ago. It was doing more harm than good. I did not want to jeopardize readers’ privacy. I did not want to be part of the bullshit web. I did not want to contribute to Google’s massive data collection and its take over of the open web. I did not want to be Google’s product. (Because fuck Google.)
I rarely even looked at those analytics back then. However, since going independent last year, I have more interest in knowing and understanding the traffic on this site. I found a fantastic solution for analytics that is simple, private, and open source called GoatCounter.
A fews days ago I changed the permalink structure on my site. I think everything went smoothly, because it looks like no one noticed, which is exactly what you want to happen with a potentially breaking change like that.
I’ve known about the Tor Project for a long time, but I guess it’s been awhile. 😅 The last time I was actively using Tor was with Vidalia, which was apparently discontinued about 5 to 6 years ago. Ha! Whoops.
Net Neutrality is officially over in the US. As the EFF notes, it will likely manifest as a slow, painful decline of the Internet. We can call congress to demand that they reverse the decision and act in the interests of the people. But whether or not that succeeds, everyone should be using a VPN regularly now to fight against the growing threats of Internet surveillance and censorship. We know better than to trust corporations and governments.
I’ve removed Google Analytics from this site. I was in a similar situation as Ash Furrow, who just wrote about doing this. I’m removing it because it simply causes more harm than good.
I just updated my blog to use Bootstrap 4.1 from v3.3.7. Its a major version with lots of breaking changes, so it took me a few hours over a few Saturday afternoons to get everything fixed up. That’s also partially why I missed posting something last month.
I’m not interested in being an advertising product for Google to exploit. I’m also not interested in the company’s unsavory practices, in general. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a year now, and I’m incredibly happy with it as a replacement for Google Search — not only for personal usage, but also for implementing a custom search component for this site.
This site used to be hosted via GitHub Pages, but I decided to move to a dedicated host to have more control over how I develop and deploy the site, and how it’s configured. A number of limitations and quirks eventually drove me to migrate away from GitHub pages to my excellent and inexpensive bare-bones host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I was also interested in learning to do all of this on my own, rather than relying on GitHub Pages “magic”. If you’re looking to setup your own Jekyll-powered site, or if you’re looking to migrate off of GitHub Pages, hopefully this is helpful.
XKCD’s posts on saving time and automation are precisely how this blog came to be. Until now, I never had the time or motivation to write on a regular basis, though I considered it often. I’ve been developing for iOS for a few years now and I’ve become increasingly involved in the Objective-C open-source community via GitHub and CocoaPods, and was lucky enough to attend (my first!) WWDC this year on its 25th anniversary. It was an awesome experience. With that said, I can’t think of a better time or better reason to begin writing about my experiences with iOS and Objective-C (and now Swift), as well as my involvement in open-source. I hope to share worthwhile and interesting things here.