That is my website!
To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts.
And I'd like to also mention https://marginalia-search.com/ which is a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.
For my part, if I come across a personal site that hasn't been updated in a few months, I don't assume it's abandoned, just that the person hasn't had anything to say for a while. I'd rather see a site with updates every few months, or even once or twice a year, than one with an update every other week saying "Sorry I haven't updated."
in the HEAD of the pages on your website, it makes autodiscovery of the RSS feed a bit easier - not just for crawlers, but also for people with RSS plugins in their browser. It will make the RSS icon appear in their browser's URL field for easy subscription. Took me a while to find the RSS link at the bottom of your pages!
If that's an issue, and if you don't mind building something out yourself, Marginalia have an excellent API that you can connect to from your own personal non-Javascript meta-search engine. I did that, and I find Marginalia awesome to deal with. They're one of my favorite internet projects.
There is! The API Key is literally "public". But apparently it often gets rate limited, because seemingly every Metasearch engine uses that one. I think there might also be a slightly less rate-limited one for Hacker News users if you search around (I no longer remember what it is since I got my own key in the end.)
You can get your own API key for free by emailing, but that would not be anonymous, I guess.
I don't have curl syntax to hand, but hopefully it's easy to figure out from these documents. I may come back and edit later with curl syntax if I get time:
If their email server does handle self-hosted SMTP server with ip literal email addresses (with the ip from the SMTP, stronger than SPF), indeed, I will probably ask for my mine.
I wish major AI services would do the same or something close.
2. I don't think just because it uses javascript make it bad. It's a very nice site now. I prefer it better than old version. My website doesn't use JS for any functionality yet. But I've never said never either. The reason hasn't arised that I need to use JS. The day it does, I will use it.
But I understand the sentiment though. I used to be a no js guy before. But I've been softened by the need to use it professionally only to think --- hmmm, not bad.
web apps are gated by the abominations of whatng cartel web engines, with even worse SDKs, mechanically certainly not 'small' and assurely a definitive nono.
And the 'old' interface, you bet I tried to use it... which is actually gated with javascript... so...
I've tested it in both w3m and dillo, should work fine as long as your browser renders noscript tags. It's very much designed from the ground up to handle browsers like that. Just requires you to manually wait a few seconds and then press the link.
One configuration that might break is if you're running something like chrome or firefox, and rigging it to not run JS. But it's really hard to support those types of configurations. If it works in w3m, it's no longer a "site requires JS" issue...
Thanks a lot for considering no-JS browser like Dillo, in the current web hellscape is certainly a difficult task. I checked and it works well in Dillo on my end.
They barely mentioned your website (fourth in five urls, mainly talking about indieblog.com and kagi.com/smallweb), so "That is my website!" is confusing and makes it seem like you're autoresponding to a keyword.
Yeah, it didn't confuse sensible people who are capable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes.
I did a Small Web search at Marginalia and was immediately pointed to sites that claim that I and everyone in my political party are literally the spawn of Satan--I really don't think it's my thing.
I helped develop the ARPANET back in 1969-1970 while working for the UCLA Comp Sci dept, got a brief mention in RFC 57, hold several network patents, and was on usenet before the usenix conference where we voted to call it that ... I'm bemused by all the people who claim that boomers are technologically inept (I think they have us mixed up with our parents). Anyway it's been a heck of a wild ride and didn't end up quite how JCR Licklider envisioned it.
I wrote this in response to one of the reviews, so I'll share it with you since you asked. :-)
I worked on an ARPA-funded speech understanding project in the 1970's at SDC--it was definitely driven by military interests. One time some of us techies were in our soundproof lab drinking wine and eating cheese and crackers when our manager brought to the big picture window an Iranian general bristling with medals--they both looked extremely unhappy.
I also worked on ARPANET development at UCLA from 1969-1971, and there was none of that. The driving motivation was ARPA-funded researchers at universities being able to readily share their work. Is ARPA funding researchers at universities an issue that can be written about? Of course, but it has nothing to do with the ARPANET per se and isn't part of the story that this book is about.
Oops--I left out a critical part of the SDC story--we were in the lab because it had an incredible sound system featuring a pair of high end AR-3 speakers. I don't recall what we were playing but I'm sure it sounded wonderful.
We also did real work in that lab of course ... mostly recording things like "What is the surfaced displacement of the Lafayette?", which our primitive system running on (pathetically slow by today's standards) Raytheon 704 and PDP-11 computers would attempt to parse and answer. The text of course was selected for the sake of obtaining a grant from the USN.
This early work, funded by the military, laid the basis for today's ubiquitous speech understanding systems. Are there issues with fundamental research being funded by the military or, say, big pharma, rather than as part of a direct planned effort by society to achieve social goals? Sure, and much can and should be written about that, but it's not the subject matter of this book.
If it could actually parse your speech and come up with an answer in 1970, it must have felt amazingly futuristic. Star Trek was only a few year old at that point. Thanks for sharing that.
The parsing broke speech into phonemes--actually a string of candidate phonemes, each candidate having an assigned probability. It made a lot of mistakes--it couldn't generally distinguish between "a" and "the" in rapid speech, and the semantic phase didn't help disambiguate those. It worked better for female voices because they have an extra formant. It didn't work well if the speaker was intoxicated--we learned this from some anomalous results that one researcher dug into and discovered that there was a "knee" in the data--it turned out that our late night speaker Bill (a giant bearded guy who wore overalls that he ordered specially from Iowa IIRC and was known as wabblezabble) had taken a break, during which he drank a considerable amount of beer, on the hypothesis/excuse that it would make his speech more, er, fluid. It had the opposite effect--the automated recognition was consistently better before the break than after.
Coming up with the answer required doing a nondeterministic parallel search of the candidate phonemes through a DAG of phrases--the problem was contained because the DAG was highly restricted to the subject matter, in this case facts about Navy ships. This was a pilot and the dream was to have a much more massive semantic net of the English language. We had linguists and a resident lexicographist (he distinguished this from a lexicographer, though the dictionary says they are synonyms--but lexicographists know better than dictionaries created by lexicographers, heh heh) working with us. The parsing code that dealt with the audio signal was written in FORTRAN and assembler, IIRC, but all the language stuff was written in a local version of LISP. Jeff Barnett, on our team, was the author of SDC's LISP2, but I'm not sure that's what we were using. He was working on developing a more performant algolish LISP called CRISP when I left. Jeff had written the parallel search algorithm, which had a "knob", as he called it, which was a floating point value that controlled the depth first/breadth first balance--any possible balance could be achieved by dialing the "knob". This was needed because it took too long to do an exhaustive search--it bailed with an answer as soon as it found one that passed some threshold. Anyway, it required recording onto tape, digitizing it and feeding it to the minicomputer, running many passes, feeding the results into the LISP program running on a mainframe, waiting an indeterminate time to make a match against a highly restricted vocabulary--more of a grind than futuristic. I remember when programs like Dragon Speech showed up ... way advanced over what we had, but still needing to be trained on a specific speaker. Now we have realtime language translation in our pockets. The other day I accidentally turned it on and my friend at the other end of the line asked who was speaking Spanish ... everything I said was being repeated in Spanish.
BTW, when I left SDC because I wanted a break from work, they offered me a spot with their new development called EFTS, but I was pretty set on leaving. EFTS--Electronic Funds Transfer System--is the backbone of all of today's digital money transfers ... ATMs, ACH, etc. I really missed the boat on that one.
P.S. In trying to remember why Bill (aka Billy) also had the nickname wabblezabble, I managed to remember his last name, which yielded his initials WAB (at UCLA initials were used as login names). I found this lovely obit which very much fits the guy I knew: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/william-br...
Auto-responding when Google Alerts spots your keyword on a new site would help promote your website.
I missed that "That" meant "the site that matches my username" so I had gone through a process of "how is this guy claiming to own https://kagi.com/smallweb" and "did he mean indieblog.page/random" and "why is he also saying he wrote something at unsungNovelty.org which doesn't match either of those". I never did figure it out, I opened all the links to check the author and finally got it. Sorry I was dumb. But antecedents are important.
No worries. But If I am behind numbers, my website will be completely different with post cadence far more regular. Not saying regular posts are bad. In fact, I am currently working on finishing my writing backlogs. But still, not everyone is behind numbers. Especially like SEO/google kind of numbers.
That is my website! To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts.
I also wrote something similar to OP - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
And I'd like to also mention https://marginalia-search.com/ which is a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.