Tag: Blogging

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, add[someuorvvng 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: I have distributed different classes of content between my three personal sites, noticed how they drifted apart or become similar again, and…
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: I started writing online by editing static web pages, and this still…
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: Now I have read the book on Automattic’s corporate culture: The Year without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun Scott is a former Microsoft manager and long-term author and speaker.…
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 also…
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…