Is anyone else concerned that the Internet is becoming a walled garden on Facebook, encouraging people never to leave the facebook site? People are more likely to read the Guardian now it’s a Facebook app. No doubt this is due to having to install the app to read content “read” by others – frictionless sharing [...]

Every time a major site with a big audience changes, there are always going to be detractors. Especially a site like Facebook. People spend a lot of time there, so interface changes are almost tantamount to moving stuff around in their lounge/den. I think there are a number of issues with the new Facebook homepage. [...]

On holiday this summer in the Vendée region (near the Loire valley), I was pleasantly surprised by my till receipt for my holiday shopping. Instead of a list in simple order of items scanned by the cashier, the receipt was both grouped by department, and ordered by highest priced item first. At a glance, you [...]

I love the series of sketch notes from Eva-Lotta Lamm, someone who attends a lot of conferences and makes notes with amazing visual impact. I could have chosen one of many different images that she has uploaded, but this one is recent, colourful and contains perhaps a few things that are less technical – though [...]

I have been doing a bit of writing lately, and might even get an article or two published in an online technical publication. Which led me to thinking about the separation between technical stuff I write, often close to my profession, and the more personal items I write at other times. There are bits of [...]

I surf around quite a lot of blogs, thanks mainly to blog exchanges like Expose Your Blog which are like StumbleUpon but based only on blogs, and have the added bonus of gaining you reciprocal traffic. I used to surf on other exchanges too, but they are all losing traffic and are poorly maintained. Expose [...]

I have added a new plugin, W3 Total Cache, to improve performance on this blog. It seemed that pages were taking a bit too long to load according to Google webmaster tools. Solutions for caching nearly always make a difference, but you have to be careful about the parameters you set. However, with minimal adjustment [...]

I have been wondering for a while why my jokes pages don’t list in search engines. They are WordPress pages which have some PHP in them to read from a separate database table containing my jokes. Every now and then I’ve tried to fix the problem, and I think I’ve finally found the issue. I’d [...]