This is a nifty thing: Million Short is a search engine that will let you remove links to the million most popular web sites from its search results. Sometimes good (and more importantly, relevant) sites get crowded out by popular sites in the results of search engines like Google. This is a natural result of … Read More

I got this graph from drupal.org. It made me laugh out loud. It shows you which versions of Drupal, one of the more popular off-the-shelf content management systems, are used the most. For some reason the webmasters of drupal.org decided to split the then current major version, 8, into all its medium versions. If you … Read More

Two years ago, I received an ominous e-mail from Facebook: “Peope who recently visited your page recommended changes to the information on your page. Please verify the information below for accuracy. [List of changes.] If we don’t hear from you before [11 days from now], the information in question will be automatically updated.” Users can … Read More

It is Google’s aim to make all the knowledge of the world findable, but is it also Google’s aim to own all the information of the world? One day I wanted to find out about upcoming events in Amsterdam pop concert venue Paradiso and because I assumed the URL might not be paradiso.nl, I googled … Read More

Ik ben een freelance webdeveloper. Dat wil zeggen dat ik als eenpitter en niet op basis van loondienst voor mijn beroep aan websites werk. Het grootste deel van mijn opdrachtgevers vindt mij zelfstandig of via mijn netwerk. Ik heb echter ook een account op freelance.nl, de grootste marktplaats in Nederland voor freelancers (althans, dat was … Read More

The information below is available in other places, but I figured I would bring it together as a sort of note-to-self, because this had me stumped for a day. Suppose you have a Drupal contrib module A that you are writing tests for. Contrib module B is optionally extending the functionality of module A, and … Read More

As a I was trawling through the statistics for this site, I noticed how popular my post about creating rounded corners with The Gimp is. I mean, I knew it was popular, it is the post with by far the most comments on this blog, but I did not know it outperformed other posts by … Read More

After predicting in 2004 (without naming names) that tools like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla might become popular CMSes … they did! In 2010 and 2014 I followed up with articles exploring which of these tools had become popular and how they described themselves over time respectively. Re-reading these articles makes me realise how quaint the … Read More

Here is one for the books. This is a graph of the so-called ‘reach’ that my roller derby photography page has on Facebook. Reach means: how many people have been exposed to my photos. (In an earlier blog post I explained why I have a Facebook page in the first place.) Every dot represents the … Read More

If you check in at a location on Facebook or enter the location for a photo, there is a chance that you will end up linking to spam. The main reason for this is that Facebook is crap and the people who make Facebook are idiots, but I say this in anger after hacking spam … Read More