You will not want to read this. Nobody does, me included. But creating it has been an interesting experiment. I have been scouring this blog for sentences, one from each blog post. In chronological order, starting in 2012. I had permitted myself to re-order sentences, but I have rarely used that option. The fountain pen…
Tag: Blogging
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.
Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Connectedness and Independence
My websites ebb and flow. After 23 years of writing online, I am recognizing recurring patterns. I am keeping ancient hyperlinks intact. All articles I had published here before 2020 are still available elsewhere, also under the former main domain used at WordPress – elkement.blog. My frustration about other referenced websites’ ever changing and abandoned…
Let Your Hyperlinks Live Forever!
It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment. (https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) Joel Spolsky did it: I’m bending over backwards not to create “linkrot” — all old links to Joel on Software…
Bots, Like This! I am an Ardent Fan of HTTPS and Certificates!
This is an experiment in Machine Learning, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, whatever. But I need proper digression first. Last autumn, I turned my back on social media and went offline for a few days. There, in that magical place, the real world was offline as well. A history of physics museum had to be opened,…
The Stages of Blogging – an Empirical Study
… with sample size 1. Last year, at the 4-years anniversary, I presented a quantitative analysis – in line with the editorial policy I had silently established: My blogging had turned from quasi-philosophical ramblings on science, work, and life to no-nonsense number crunching. But the comment threads on my recent posts exhibit my subconsciousness spilling…
Anniversary 4 (4 Me): “Life Ends Despite Increasing Energy”
I published my first post on this blog on March 24, 2012. Back then its title and tagline were: Theory and Practice of Trying to Combine Just Anything Physics versus engineering off-the-wall geek humor versus existential questions IT versus the real thing corporate world’s strangeness versus small business entrepreneur’s microcosmos knowledge worker’s connectedness versus striving…
Google-Mediated Self-Poetry – Holiday Edition
A new sub-genre of my experimental internet poetry! Is Google able to capture the essence of this blog? Rules: Search your own site on Google, using site:[your site]. This ‘poem’ is based on results from site:elkement.wordpress.com. Open the first search result in a new tab. Pick one phrase from this page (your own content) and…
Shortest Post Ever
… self-indulgent though, but just to add an update on the previous post. My new personal website is live: elkement.subversiv.at I have already redirected the root URLs of the precursor sites radices.net, subversiv.at and e-stangl.at. Now I am waiting for Google’s final verdict; then I am going to add the rewrite map for the 1:n…
Random Things I Have Learned from My Web Development Project
It’s nearly done (previous episode here). I have copied all the content from my personal websites, painstakingly disentangling snippets of different ‘posts’ that were physically contained in the same ‘web page’, re-assigning existing images to them, adding tags, consolidating information that was stored in different places. Raking the Virtual Zen Garden – again. (Voice from…
My Flat-File Database
A brief update on my web programming project. I have preferred to create online text by editing simple text files; so I only need a text editor and an FTP client as management tool. My ‘old’ personal and business web pages are currently created dynamically in the following way: [Code for including a script (including…
Interrupting Regularly Scheduled Programming …
(… for programming.) Playing with websites has been a hobby of mine since nearly two decades. What has intrigued me was the combination of different tasks, appealing to different moods – or modes: Designing the user interface and organizing content. Writing the actual content, and toggling between creative and research mode. Developing the backend: database…
What the Internet Asks of Me
… via search terms submitted by blog visitors, of course! This is a cross-over of search term poetry and using search terms for serious investigations: A collection of phrases from 2015 WordPress statistics, plus comments [in italics and bold]. As usual, phrases are unedited except from truncations at beginning and end, and I have added…
Anatomy of a Decision (1)
Four years ago I tried something new – I took a decision and started communicating it (some half-baked version of it) without having worked out a detailed plan. One year later I started this blog, reflecting on the journey and this decision. So I celebrate the 4 years anniversary with shameless, self-indulgent nostalgia – reblogging…
About 14,5 Random Thoughts on Blogging and Social Media
I have been blogging on WordPress.com since nearly three years, and I noted the following: Blogs have a half life. Many decay after 2 years. Blogs I had followed had been deleted, or bloggers had suddenly stopped publishing without notice. There are tons of single-post-blogs. A user-friendly editor motivates people to get started. But blogging does…
On Resisting the Bait
I don’t mean click-bait. I mean write-bait. That article that wants you to launch your 2.000 words rhetoric missile, and click the red button: Publish. I am pondering about one of the most successful genres clicked and shared on social media: a blend of popular psychology, life hacking, and business wisdom, perhaps enriched by trusted…
All My Theories Have Been Wrong. Fortunately!
I apologize to Google. They still like my blog. This blog’s numbers plummeted as per Webmaster Tools, here and here you find everything you never wanted to know about it. I finally figured that my blog was a victim of Google’s latest update Panda 4.1. Sites about ‘anything’ had suffered, and the Panda rollout matched…
Looking for Patterns
Scott Adams, of Dilbert Fame, has a lot of useful advice in his autobiographical book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. He recommends looking for patterns in your life, without attempting to theorize about cause and effects. Learning from those patterns you could increase the chance that luck with hit you….
Waging a Battle against Sinister Algorithms
I have felt a disturbance of the force. As you might expect from a blog about anything, this one has a weird collection of unrelated top pages and posts. My WordPress Blog Stats tell me I am obviously an internet authority on: how rodents get into kitchen appliances, about the physics of a spinning toy,…
The More Content You Have Created
… the more time you need for curating. My first ever attempt at tweeting an aphorism. But it is true for me, and it defines the way I use online spaces. As a contributor of online content, I am operating in different modes: Creator, with emphasis on creating something original – including unintended re-invention of…
I Picked the Right Blogging Platform! (Book Review: The Year without Pants)
Before starting this blog I compared blogging tools in 2011. These two facts about WordPress and Automattic did win me over: Every new employee has to do three weeks of end-user support, regardless of position. They have a developer who calls himself the Quantum Bug Creator and has a PhD in Quantum Cryptography. Now I…
Blog Cleanup – Raking the Virtual Zen Garden Again
I am proud owner of a full season of Monk on DVD, and as a child nobody ever had to tell me to tidy up my room. I indulged not only in cleaning my Lego(*) world with a fine paint brush but I rather re-organized all my belongings in Feng-Shui-meets-OCD-style quite often. (*) Lego is…
The Web As I Want to Remember It
This title might be due to unknowingly plagiarizing dejavu.org – The web as we remember it. I haven’t visited dejavu.org in years, but I did now as I felt I need to wax nostalgic. This might be due to my recent tinkering with my websites‘ layouts. As a child I crafted 200-faced paper polyhedra whose…
Intelligent Life-Forms in the Blogosphere – Again!
This post might baffle readers that come here for: science / physics / book reviews / corporate world dark satire / search term poetry / navel-gazing / self-destruction … and the other genres I have forgotten. However, I’d argue that this post covers all of those – in a subtle way. My blog has a…
My Reading List
This blog has been inspired by books more often than not. When I crafted my first personal website many years ago, a database of my favorite books was one of the first things I added and changed frequently. For better or for worse – I organize my thoughts and my websites in relation to books…
Using Social Media in Bursts. Is. Just. Normal.
I have seen lots of turkey pictures last week and this has reminded me of an anniversary: When I saw those last time I have just started using Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. @elkement Little bird has left its egg! #newbie #twitter — Elke Stangl (@elkement) November 22, 2012 So a review is overdue, and I…
Breaking News on Search Term Poetry (Good, Bad, Ugly)
This is a break from quantum physics – you deserve it! Based on your questions – no un-follows so far fortunately – I will follow-up with attempting again to pick the right metaphors for 1026 dimensional spaces and tons of enormous vectors. But there is more (enigmatic) to this universe than quantum field theory – such…
Unplug Myself: First Update
It has been three and a half weeks since I have unplugged myself from social media and suspended blogging temporarily. I was rather active on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter before since I had Connected Myself to the Collective last November. Now my Klout score is dwindling again. This is my first update from the void,…
What Is Normal? (My Way of Announcing Blogging Time-Out)
I remember the best Out-of-Office note I have ever received – musing on not being able to get back to me as quick as normally, and culminating in the philosophical question: But – what is normal? Probably this is one of the hidden, leading questions that have driven this blog ever since I started it…
Decoding Myself: Searching for Hidden Clues in My Blog Posts’ Titles
I am inventing a new experimental genre: Header Poetry. I tag this post with Spam Poetry and Search Term Poetry as – theoretically – my headers could show up as search terms or skillfully drafted spam comments. As an innovator in poetry based on recycled material I need to do this – in order to…
elkemental Force 