turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef

Writing by tag: web

My website disappeared from Bing and DuckDuckGo

25 March 2022
Updated: 28 July 2022

I discovered earlier this week that my website is no longer being indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo. In fact, it appears that it has been deliberately removed from their search indexes. On Bing, rather than display a “no results” message, it displays a “Some results have been removed” message, which is very concerning. Notably, however, Google search is working fine.

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NFTs and web3

16 January 2022

I mostly avoid interacting with and discussing the world of NFTs and cryptocurrencies — it’s not for me. However, a couple of blog posts caught my attention recently and I highly recommend reading them.

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How to start a blog or portfolio website, for developers

01 November 2021
Updated: 05 November 2021

Ever so often an iOS developer asks me how to get started with making their own blog or portfolio website. Or, I’ll see a software developer from another community on Twitter ask the same thing. Often they are earlier in their career, or unfamiliar with web development, or unsure whether to build from scratch or use a platform, or all of the above. I find myself consistently making the same recommendations to folks. For this post, I want to share what I think is a great approach to get started, and how you can dive deeper once you master the basics.

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Recently updated posts

22 October 2021

Periodically, I go back to add updates to older posts. I’ve been doing this for some time now, although not as often as I would like. I aspire to be as good and diligent as Michael Tsai, but that’s an incredibly high bar. (How does he do it?!)

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RSS feeds, Jekyll, and absolute versus relative URLs

06 June 2021
Updated: 09 June 2021

Lately I’ve been upgrading and making improvements to my website and blog. As part of that work, I was updating and refining how my RSS feed gets generated with Jekyll. And then I realized something that I had not given much thought to previously. When including the full content of blog posts in an RSS feed, if you link to other posts or pages on your site should you be using absolute URLs or are relative URLs ok?

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Simple, private, and open source analytics with GoatCounter

08 May 2020

I removed Google Analytics on this site over two years ago. It was doing more harm than good. I did not want to jeopardize readers’ privacy. I did not want to be part of the bullshit web. I did not want to contribute to Google’s massive data collection and its take over of the open web. I did not want to be Google’s product. (Because fuck Google.)

I rarely even looked at those analytics back then. However, since going independent last year, I have more interest in knowing and understanding the traffic on this site. I found a fantastic solution for analytics that is simple, private, and open source called GoatCounter.

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Choosing a VPN service

24 June 2018
Updated: 08 October 2021

Net Neutrality is officially over in the US. As the EFF notes, it will likely manifest as a slow, painful decline of the Internet. We can call congress to demand that they reverse the decision and act in the interests of the people. But whether or not that succeeds, everyone should be using a VPN regularly now to fight against the growing threats of Internet surveillance and censorship. We know better than to trust corporations and governments.

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Upgrading to Bootstrap 4

And some minor design tweaks 16 April 2018

I just updated my blog to use Bootstrap 4.1 from v3.3.7. Its a major version with lots of breaking changes, so it took me a few hours over a few Saturday afternoons to get everything fixed up. That’s also partially why I missed posting something last month.

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Replacing Google Search with DuckDuckGo

And how to add a custom DuckDuckGo search box to your site 25 February 2018
Updated: 23 October 2021

I’m not interested in being an advertising product for Google to exploit. I’m also not interested in the company’s unsavory practices, in general. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a year now, and I’m incredibly happy with it as a replacement for Google Search — not only for personal usage, but also for implementing a custom search component for this site.

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Building a site with Jekyll on NearlyFreeSpeech

My blog infrastructure, and migrating off of GitHub pages 10 September 2017
Updated: 07 October 2020

This site used to be hosted via GitHub Pages, but I decided to move to a dedicated host to have more control over how I develop and deploy the site, and how it’s configured. A number of limitations and quirks eventually drove me to migrate away from GitHub pages to my excellent and inexpensive bare-bones host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I was also interested in learning to do all of this on my own, rather than relying on GitHub Pages “magic”. If you’re looking to setup your own Jekyll-powered site, or if you’re looking to migrate off of GitHub Pages, hopefully this is helpful.

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Supporting JSON feed

Now available 03 September 2017

A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to adding support for Brent Simmons’ and Manton Reece’s JSON Feed for this blog. You can subscribe to the feed here. It was simple and fun to implement.

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Built with open-source

The beginnings of this blog 09 June 2014

XKCD’s posts on saving time and automation are precisely how this blog came to be. Until now, I never had the time or motivation to write on a regular basis, though I considered it often. I’ve been developing for iOS for a few years now and I’ve become increasingly involved in the Objective-C open-source community via GitHub and CocoaPods, and was lucky enough to attend (my first!) WWDC this year on its 25th anniversary. It was an awesome experience. With that said, I can’t think of a better time or better reason to begin writing about my experiences with iOS and Objective-C (and now Swift), as well as my involvement in open-source. I hope to share worthwhile and interesting things here.

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