Month: August 2022

Re-imagining the Web Portal

Commercial portals:

  • Yahoo
  • Excite
  • MSN
  • AOL
  • Excite
  • NBCi
  • Lycos

 

Non corporate portals

Usually subject oriented.  Topical or local directory plus forum or social network, news.

Portals were all about banner ads.  They wanted to keep you on site viewing new pages to get the banner reps.  Is their really a point for portals today without advertising?

I’m striking out on WordPress Glossary Plugins

I wanted to add a glossary to my directory’s blog to handle some repetitive knowledge tasks.

Well I’ve looked through most of the WordPress plugins available and:

  1. The free version is under powered and the Pro version is a damn subscription costing $55 annually.  Dream on.  I got too many subscriptions already.  This ain’t a commercial blog.
  2. The whole glossary plugin is way to complicated for what I want.
  3. Sounds perfect but requires block editor.
  4. Sounds good, not recommended for my version of WP and/or has not been updated in 2 years.
  5. Should work, tried it, didn’t work. Plugin homepage 404 and plugin designers website in French.

 

I could also make do with a wiki plugin, or maybe a Knowledge Base plugin.   Both are a bit more than I need.

Search Engines that Have Found this Site

This will be a running list.

Site created 4 August 2022.  Launched around 8 August 2022.  Very few inbound links.

As of 18 August 2022.  Search was for “cyberzettel”

Bing – Yes.  extensive crawling.  Already got first SE hit via DuckDuckGo which relies on Bing.  Still surprised.

Google – Yes.  Several pages.

Yandex – No.

Mojeek – No.

Gigablast – No.

Brave – No.

Right Dao – No.

Yep – Yes.  This really surprised me. Only one or two pages plus a couple of pages that link to or mention.

Alexandria – No.

 

Bonus Surprise –

Wiby.me – little Wiby.me did not have this site in their index because they don’t crawl the web.  But they found two pages in their index that actually mentioned the site.  So they do keep their index fresh.  Cool.

This isn’t a critique of the search engines listed, but since I have a new site it presents an opportunity to test how fast these search engines find and index.

Music Discoveries I Like on Youtube

These are some of the best music videos I’ve found during the Pandemic on Youtube.  If I need to recommend something to someone I would start here.

Postmodern Jukebox: rewrites rock and pop songs to sound like 20th Century jazz songs.  They are wonderful.

Dream On – Postmodern Jukebox ft. Morgan James (Aerosmith Cover)

Creep – Vintage Postmodern Jukebox Radiohead Cover ft. Haley Reinhart

 

Pentatonix is an a capella group.

Pentatonix – Hallelujah (Official Video)

Pentatonix – The Sound of Silence (Official Video)

 

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Feature Wishlist for Hypothetical Indieweb Personal Blog Script

IMHO the Indieweb needs to have a plug and play blog script in order to gain wider acceptance.  Keep in mind I’m not a developer or a coder.  Script is aimed at individual bloggers for personal blogs.

Whole script needs to be something that can be 1-click installed on most hosts.

  1.  Simple themes that are easy to customize and share.  (A lot like the old HTML templates of the past.)
  2. Extending the stock blog script would be done through plugins.
  3. Commenting system built in.
  4. Indieweb stuff built in or the core plugins pre installed.
  5. Flat file database for long term robustness.
  6. At a minimum, a Markdown based editor to keep things simple.
  7. Categories and tags.
  8. Site search.
  9. Ability to migrate your posts.  So the migration format needs to be something most blog scripts use. WP?
  10. RSS
  11. SEO competent out of the box. Spiderable.
  12. Anti-spam – ship it with something like the Anti-spam Bee to protect comments.
  13. Some sort of captcha system.

What else?