A friend who is completely technologically unable and a great painter asked me to help him create a website. Having cleaned up his various content files, a few days ago I made a start on the presentation, and heavy going it was too. Although he really wants only a very simple site, I began by trying to simplify an extremely powerful, all-singing, all-dancing framework. It was incredibly difficult, with bits of markup being injected from who knows where and doing who knows what. Very frustrating indeed, to the point where I was beginning to regret having agreed to do it.

Then I had a revelation.

There’s more ➢

It really is like learning to type and operate a mouse all over again. Sat at the dining room table, connected to the office iMac via RealVNC on the iPad, with a magic keyboard and a magic mouse, and I keep making incredibly stupid mistakes. It is weird, as if sometimes more complicated commands,...

There’s more ➢

A real downer of a post from Michael Lewis of searchmysite.net. He reports that Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots. On some days, no human used his search engine. I regret that I am one of those absent humans.

What to do?

One thing I could do mysel...

There’s more ➢

Further to my own prediction, a deliberate excerpt is not the reason for my feeds failing to validate. Nope, it is a dastardly invisible character, as pointed out by Jan Boddez in a comment. This problem has bitten me before, and I always forget it. It would be very cool if I could automagically test for the presence of this kind of stuff; StackOverflow suggests that iconv --from-code=UTF-8 would do the needful, so that could be something, especially if I can trigger something like that when I save a new blog post.

There’s more ➢

Today’s on-this-day post took me back to the heady days of 2004, when this weblog was baked to order by Tinderbox and the RSS feed it generated proved to be invalid. I guess I solved it eventually but that post prompted me to check again today. And once again, it does not validate, not RSS nor Atom.

There’s more ➢