google

Jan 5, 2021 ∞

Performing Pages

Every month Google, or specifically the ‘Google Search Console Team’ sends me an email showing the ‘Top performing pages’ on my site. Presumably that means the ones to which they, Google, have sent the most people.

Consistently, the top one is a post from 2012, about a particular use case of Pandoc. Specifically: Tip: using Pandoc to create truly standalone HTML files.

So it’s clear that if I want more engagement here – or at least more drive-by readers – I should write more technical-support-type articles.

That’s unlikely to happen at the moment. That page was a complete mess, though. There were artifacts left over from WordPress plugins, and the whole thing was displaying at the wrong width for reasons that I don’t understand. So I’ve cleaned it up, and now at least it looks a bit more welcoming for the hundreds of visitors who come every month.

I’m not even sure what it describes is still necessary – Pandoc has had a lot of changes since then – but it’s not wrong, so oh well.

Jan 9, 2018 ∞

I Never Thought I'd See the Day...

When Gmail launched several years ago offering a free gigantic storage plan of, I think, 1 gigabyte, it seemed impossible that anyone could ever fill that much space with email. Since then, of course, the free allowance has quietly grown and grown. So too has the volume of email, and the average size of individual emails.

Until today, when I see this:

Gmail showing 99% used of 15GB

99% of 15 GB. Whoops! Of course, seven years of using it as a repository for daily backups from WordPress will do that. (It’s not the most elegant of backup solutions, but it’s easy and it works.) I deleted everything before 2017 and now it’s down to 60%.

Jan 11, 2017 ∞

Duck(Duck)ing the User Interface

It must be well over a year now since I switched my main search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo. I changed partly because of concerns over Google’s handling of privacy issues, and partly just to try out the new one.

DuckDuckGo’s results are usually fine, and if you ever can’t find something and you think Google might be better, it’s easy to redirect your search there by adding “!g” at the end. There are other special codes like this, such as “!w” to search Wikipedia.

So it’s all fine. But what I’ve only gradually realised is that I much prefer the Duck’s user interface. And this is for one simple reason: infinite scrolling.

Now, infinite scrolling isn’t always good, and I’m sure it has a negative effect on things like usability and caching, in at least some cases. But on DDG (as I’m sure no-one ever calls it), it makes the whole search experience better.

Because sometimes there are more than ten Interesting hits. Or the interesting ones are long after the tenth. But with Google, you get ten on a page. And then you’ve got to click or touch a link to go to the next ten. And it just feels so old fashioned.

After just a few months on DDG (as we should all start calling it from now on) you can’t go back to Google without feeling a weird interrupt at the end of a page, before you go, “Oh, yeah, gotta click that.”

It’s just an inferior experience.

Jul 26, 2016 ∞

Self-Hosting

One very good reason why you should post at your own site, and not necessarily trust big companies to look after your stuff: Why Did Google Erase Dennis Cooper’s Beloved Literary Blog? – The New Yorker.

Dec 22, 2014 ∞

The Circle by Dave Eggers (Books 2014, 16)

This is interesting. Seems to have got a lot of attention when it came out, but somehow I wasn't aware of it. It's very much a novel of now, though probably set slightly into the future -- five minutes or so, probably.

Our hero, Mae Holland, is a young woman, not long out of college, who is just starting a job at the Circle. The Circle is GooTwitBook, essentially: a massive internet company that has gobbled up all the previous incumbents (it owns 90% of search, for example) and redefined interaction on the net via its TrueYou identity technology. Real names are not just encouraged; they are required.

Internet trolling disappeared overnight, it seems.Unbelievable enough. Perhaps more so: no-one (almost no-one) seems to be in the least bit bothered by the reductions in privacy, the spread of The Circle into every aspect of life (putting chips in kids to prevent kidnapping; nobody complains; is kidnapping that much of a problem in the US?)

I thoroughly enjoyed it, I should say, before I tear into it too much. Eggers keeps the pages turning, which is always a plus. On the other hand, it takes a long time before anything significant happens. Mae starts her job, learns the ropes, meets people, gets more and more involved in the social-networking aspects of the circle… we know things are going to take a turn for the dramatic, because the blurb tells us so ("… the closer she comes to discovering a sinister truth…")

But it must be 200-odd pages in (of nearly 500) before we get much more than scene-setting.

And ultimately, while I can see how someone like Mae could be drawn further and further in after starting out with the best intentions, I find it very hard to believe that the entire rest of the world would go along with the extremities of the Circle’s plans. It’s set in essentially our world: where are the EFF? Where are the ACLU? Where are the voices from other countries that aren’t keen on an American corporation’s hegemony?

Where, even, are the corporations that stand up for privacy? I’ve just got a new iPhone 6 as I write this, and I can’t help but think that Apple’s pro-privacy stance – their assertion that no-one can get at our data stored in iCloud – not even them, not even if there’s a court order – is antithetical to everything that the Circle represents.

Which is one of the reasons why the Circle looks most like Google (it has three guys at the top, known as “the Three Wise Men”).

Of course, these criticisms might be just symptomatic of what can happen when you approach a “mainstream”, “literary” book with a science-fiction head: you question the worldbuilding, of course.

Ultimately it’s a shame: the Circle the organisation is completely believable and convincing in itself. It’s just hard to believe that it could expand in quite as unchecked a fashion as it does. And I found Mae to be partly endearing, partly annoying, which could be a realistic portrayal, and a good example of characterisation. In truth, though, she has no character. And possibly less believable than the growth of the Circle is the extent to which Mae gives herself to it, to its beliefs; even when they break her best friend, Annie, who got her the job in the first place.

So all in all, something of a wasted opportunity.

Nov 21, 2014 ∞

Thin

We used to call this “thin clients”; or just a terminal logged on to a server or mainframe. Jason Snell writes of something newish that Adobe and Google are doing with Chromebooks:

This week I got a demo of Photoshop running inside Chrome, and while it was really interesting, some of my assumptions were faulty. It turns out that when Adobe says Photoshop is a “streaming app,” they mean it—it’s much more like screen sharing than native software. Photoshop runs remotely on a Windows-based server, and video of the app’s interface streams to the Chrome browser.

via Six Colors: Adobe streams Photoshop to Chromebooks.

Jan 14, 2012 ∞

Cluttered by Google, Lost by Bing

I was reading The Clutter Didn’t Kill the Love by Brent Simmons, about how he was trying Microsoft's Bing search engine, instead of Google. His reason was the current worry that Google is becoming less than trustworthy.

Google losing trust would be a shame. But at least a Google search for “martin mccallion” (without the quotes) has this blog as the number one hit. Try that on Bing at the moment and you get a whole pile of other Martin McCallions.¹ The worst part to me is that the first six are Facebook or LinkedIn profiles (the seventh is one of those annoying directory sites, then you get me).

I wouldn’t mind other people with the same name appearing above me, if it was their proper sites; but to me social-network profiles feel like distinctly second-class web entities.

Or is that snobbish?

As an experiment, and to ensure a like-for-like comparison, I signed out of Google, and went to the .com version (I normally use .co.uk by default). I was still at the top. ↩︎

Jul 12, 2006 ∞

WordPress, this blog, and the Google cache

I doubt that anybody noticed, but my last entry has been missing a bit — in fact, missing most of itself — for a week or more. I don’t know how it happened. I did make a minor edit to it a few days after initially posting it, and I can only suppose that either I or WordPress somehow messed something up.

Unfortunately I had already deleted the draft from my PDA where I composed it. Fortunately there is a behemoth in California that looks after the careless blogger. A bit of obscure Google-diving and my post is back.

Thanks, Google. In future I’ll keep everything in text files.