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…
Tag: Websites
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 Orphaned Internet Domain Risk
I have clicked on company websites of social media acquaintances, and something is not right: Slight errors in formatting, encoding errors for special German characters. Then I notice that some of the pages contain links to other websites that advertize products in a spammy way. However, the links to the spammy sites are embedded in…
Other People Have Lives – I Have Domains
These are just some boring update notifications from the elkemental Webiverse. The elkement blog has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, and the punktwissen blog will turn five in December. Time to celebrate this – with new domain names that says exactly what these sites are – the ‘elkement.blog‘ and the ‘punktwissen.blog‘ (Edit: which now –…
Where to Find What?
I have confessed on this blog that I have Mr. Monk DVDs for a reason. We like to categorize, tag, painstakingly re-organize, and re-use. This is reflected in our Innovations in Agriculture … … as well as in my periodical Raking The Virtual Zen Garden: Updating collections of web resources, especially those related to the…
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…
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…
Finally Mobile-Friendly! (How I Made Googlebot Happy)
Not this blog of course – it had been responsive already. But I gave in to Google’s nagging and did not ignore messages in Google Webmaster Tools any longer. All my home-grown websites had a fixed width of the content pane and a fixed left sidebar. On a mobile device you only saw the upper…
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,…
I Am Too Googleable!
What a letdown. I wanted to report on near completion of The Website Resurrection Project – but I had a mind-altering experience. On the upside, I am not afraid of identity theft or surveillance anymore. My dentist had to cancel an appointment the day before. I showed up some minutes before the appointed time. The…
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…
On Writing or: What Do I Need to Smoke to Understand Your Websites?
This is a verbatim quote. (“This” refers to the second part of the title. The first one is a lame reference to Stephen King, of course). It is a question asked by a former colleague some years ago who had been exposed to my proto-blog websites for the first time. These websites are subject to…
elkemental Force 