Jeremy, What's a boosted post?

I just got an email from the Facebook advertising team.

I get these because I was admin for a Facebook page while I was involved in a (successful) Kickstarter-funded comics project. I could take myself off the admin list but to de-admin yourself (as with so many things about Facebook Pages) you have to do a emotionally awkward things. Let me say right away that the other admin won't mind me having access. I'm 100% trustworthy. I may be involved again in the future. I'm an extra pair of expert eyes. My options are:

1. Re-open contact with the other admin and negotiate my removal. Rejecting, awkward, and emotionally challenging for us both! 
2. Remove myself as an admin.  Rejecting, awkward, and emotionally challenging for me now, and for the other admin when she notices later -  and probably quite hurtful, too.

So, you see the difficulty. I'll stay as admin, and take the emails and the bugging to promote posts (which, like so many things, isn't working as well as it used to) and we'll all be fine, probably....

But to get back to the email. The subject line was Jeremy, What's a boosted post? FFS, Facebook Ad Team, if you don't know, then we're all in trouble. I'm hoping you know!

Also, stop pretending to be my apprentice.  

eternal downscroll and the downpage lacuna

I pull down the page, and pause. Pull down the page and pause.
While the content loads.
While the content loads,
while the page finds yet more page
below itself.

The tendons that link my finger to my wrist
slide through my carpal like elastic in a hood
puppet string my radius and ulna
to the very elbow

The muscles that balance my arm in quiet tension
Bunched over the bicep, taut across the tricep
Engaged, as my yoga teacher would say
to my ragged shoulder

All of these are begging me to stop,
and the neck too.

I pull down the page.
The scroll-bar catches, and lets go
There is more beyond the more
And more after.

My resource investigator brain
My hunter gatherer excitement
insists

The blank page
fills

Information transmits
spaced by whitepage lacunae

A tap, a click
a pause in the information flow
and then the delicious down-arrow saccade flutter
of information, arriving.
  

the spam filter falls out of sync with online registration requirements

Today's message is brought to you by the colour grey and the letters f, m and s,

Dear [Redacted]

I'm assuming what I am responding to is an automated marketing email that gets sent when someone has started the process of looking at a report but not registered. So I'm not especially expecting a response. However, I do in this circumstance have a thing to say, so I'm going to say it, even though I might be howling into the empty void of a shared inbox in an abandoned marketing department (though the individual name was a nice touch, [Redacted]).

Straightforwardly, I AM interested in looking at your reports. I was slightly disappointed to discover that I have to register my details to do so, but understand that information is often transactional; and be reassured that, though my password lists now run to eight pages, like most adults working in the sector I've grown hardened to this. So here I am, trying to register on your website right now, but it's not going well. Not because I'm unwilling to register (although I am, a little - if's cheeky to call something free when the cost is actually registration and consent to be marketed to) but because though I've certainly started the registration process, I really can't complete it.

The problem occurring is that your verification code emails aren't getting through our spam filters. Yes, yes, yes. I know. Check my spam folder. But in common with many large organisations nowadays, we don't have "spam folders" as such to check (well, I do, but let's leave that aside for now, your verification email won't be in it). Instead, emails considered to be potentially spam are quarantined at server and sent on at midnight for me to review and release if non-suspicious the following morning. It stops about half my spam and quarantines about the same amount of legitimate mail, which is annoying enough that I've put in a service call about it, but tolerable enough that when I was told there was nothing that could be done I accepted it, shrugged and carried on.

But it's just starting to quarantine verification emails, sometimes, now. You're the second site it's done it for. I did a thing for the last site, but for you, I've just let it sit for now. I'll come back to the problem tomorrow. 

If your verification links don't expire, I can just click it tomorrow morning. That would be pretty poor security practice though, and I would expect better of you, [Redacted], even though this bit of your service is barely more than an email-harvest to allow access to faully anonymised content. There's no help available, either specific to registration and log-on, or generally on the site, so any solution would need to be mine, and mine alone. I did, as you always do, that quick time cost vs. information benefit calculation and decided to shelve fixing it until tomorrow and then decide if I wanted to activate a workaround.

Then your email plopped into my inbox, offering to help me realise how many reports you had and how valuable they were, and how I really should register. Trying to win my heart, this with superlatives and oily with salestalk. I only say this, [Redacted] because you are a Marketing Manager, and salestalk is what you do. I mean no criticim. But you see, the trouble is, this spam thing I'm using, it's not something odd or boutique. It's one of the major, major solutions in use in big organisations. What I'm saying, [Redacted], is that it won't just be me. It's going to be lots of people, and this mail is going to go to all those people.

So please, check your stats. Revisit your registration story. And for heaven's sake, rein in or differentiate the follow-up emails. The user isn't always saying f*** this. Sometimes they are saying this is f***ed.

Sincerely,

[insert standard sig here]

the day that moodgym went behind a paywall

Every two years, or so the joke went, I needed to go into the moodgym. Ever since a bad sequence, first with depression with cause, then with a trainee counsellor, and then with a very slow sequence of learning emotional management, I stumbled across the moodgym. It's possible that I was just in a receptive phase when I found it; or maybe it is actually better than the other tools, but it proved useful. Whenever the wobbles started to become a steady veering off the road, back into the moodgym I would go and get back in shape. I especially appreciated the opportunity to do without the counsellor; who needs a little additional social anxiety chucked into the mix?

I'd suggest it to people, from time to time. Although you had to role-play being an Australian university student, that in itself was weirdly soothing; the online equivalent of the disassociative finger-wiggle. The anonymous web-forms kept your secrets. You decided when you'd done enough, how deep to go, and what to explore.

The UK versions all charge. Most of these things charge, in fact, and I wondered if they were better. As someone with mild to moderate depression I can sign up for the right sort of studies to try them out, and I kept and eye out and applied for one. I was assigned to the control group, though, which got Moodgym (hey ho). Going in with a critical, reviewer's eye though, was interesting. It was relatively simple, but then so is emotional regulation. Like the old joke about healthy eating being communicable in a single sentence (eat moderately, not too much meat) healthy thinking is almost as straightforward (think positively, be kind, solve or set aside problems). The difficulty lies as ever with habits and habituation. The gentle repetitions of moodgym help deconstruct and reconstruct these. The simple, undistracting design was a relaxing retreat from the hyperstimulation of online activity. It was good, I said in my feedback. It helped.

So to 2017 and I suggest it, again, and later get a gentle email enquiry sent through. "Free?" it says. I go check and discover that this product developed with public money has been spun out into a commercial enterprise and that moodgym now sits behind a paywall. Bah. Over a million users worldwide, it boasts. Well. I bet that's gone down a bit from its peak years. It's still way cheaper than the UK's finest, the Big White Wall, and has the added benefit that at least we know what's inside it; Big White Wall's description could as easily describe Youthnet's The Mix, an online information website with peer support forums moderated by, well, youth workers for the Mix and health workers for Big White Wall. For the amount they're charging I'm assuming there's more to it than that, but for £24/month I'm not going to be finding out any time soon. In fact, for AU$39/year I'm not going to be finding out how Moodgym's revamp went.

Not to worry, though. There's an American charity (yes, sorry, you're still roleplaying) called Anxiety BC which is making effective self-help tools available freely online, and you can build up a pretty good programme using their tools. There is content for all manner of different individual situations (check tools from the adults section too) but here are three things that are basically useful for everyone:

• Fear Ladders
• Thinking Traps
• Visualisations

No online forms, sadly. You have to use an app (Mindshift) or print out sheets of paper. So yes, I do miss the simple, low stimulation web-forms of Moodgym (athough redesign, so that may have changed) and its closed, tidy structure. But similar tools are still out there, and still outside the paywalls. 

an undifferentiated mess of atomic information items

This week's advice on better writing for the web included an unexpected moment of poetry, when a poorly designed page was described as an an undifferentiated mess of atomic information items.

The approved style (short sentences, subheadings, single concept, paragraphs chunked to clarity) is drummed into my style nowadays. As a creator of information content, I have to write. But writing, the web tells us is bad; not what the reader wants. We should use as little of it as possible.

This struggle between attention span and communication needs has lead us to a new homogeneity of current web-fashion. The previous, post-tablet, mobile first look I derided as noddy and big buttons has superficially grown up; bright colours are muted, pictures are bought from the classy end of the clip-art collection. But the pictures are very large, and there are almost no words, and destination actions are conspicuously absent, or come with a design shelf that makes it clear that this idea belongs to a previous iteration of the communication object.

This new look, perhaps all pictures, no facts or functions, is in part lead by the templating of the modern web service providers, and in part by a desire to have websites look current uber alles. The straight-out-of-the-box option is so simple, so quick, as fast to set us as an instagram feed; and does even less, until you start to shell out for premium features.

At least the page that is an undifferentiated mass of information items (and I do automatically start thinking about my university site, my authority site when I say this, because damn those sites are confusing until you learn them), but at least that site has information on it.

Beware the sirens of over-optimisation. At the end of the story, you're saying nothing to everybody, endlessly.

searching for yoga mats, sorted by price

I was trying to find a yoga mat on a leading online everything store (birthday present rather than for personal use) and after the usual frustrating first five minutes of trying to hone the search to actually include yoga mats my intended gift victim would enjoy, set the sorting to price high to low. Yoga mats topped out at a relatively modest £5K+, which shows how much the algorithm price wars have dropped off in recent years. In fact, a lot of the ads were for legitimately expensive items like inflatable and ultra-padded cheerleading mats, giant yoga mats to cover an entire room, and  yoga mat trolleys. Still a few people kicking it old-school though, with the list topped by three identical and utterly ordinary products priced in the thousands.

But it was when I set the pricing low to high (looking for carry straps I think) that the real surprise occurred. There were two or three yoga mat carry straps, but everything else was, I kid you not, teeny tiny tacky lacy strappy undies illustrated by all manner of pictures of professionally pleased to see you ladies. I was in the grip of a big EEEK already (mainly at the thought of the ads that would now be chasing me across the internet) when I spotted that adult items had been excluded from the search. Well, thank heavens for that, I suppose.

But what the heck is happening here? Time for five minute's thought:

• Hypothesis #1: Some SEO scamp has tagged all the products in the store (it is all one store)  with Yoga Mat, presumably on the grounds that ladies who like yoga may also like skimpy pants.
• Hypothesis #2: It is common practice to massively multiply tag penny items, on the assumption that people just go into a click-buy haze when they see such bargains.
• Hypothesis #3: There is some alternative use for yoga mats of which I am not aware.

I clicked through to one of the more innocuous items to check it out, and what's been done is either sort of clever, in an annoying sort of way, or a result of automatic categorisation having gone wrong. It's also possible it's an exploitation of a known weakness, so essentially both.

Under special offers, possibly because there is no-where else to go when most of what you're selling is retailing at £0.01+ p+p, the seller has simply linked back to some site search pages, including best rated yoga mat reviews among  other outdoor and fitness categories. The category assigned, Sports > Outdoors > Fitness > Yoga > Mats, appears to have been lifted from this non-information in the special offer category.

While the seller is a mere # 69,166 in the Sports > Outdoors category, they are a surprisingly high #384 in Sports > Outdoors > Fitness > Yoga > Mats, suggesting that for some yoga fans at least, hypothesis #1 (or potentially, for some lingerie fans, hypothesis #3) does hold.

Hypothesis #2 I discarded by running a few more searches (shoe stretchers, pepper grinders, sugar mice, yoga bricks, door mats, watch straps, exhaustive search run fans). No other search terms had suffered this mass lingerie invasion.

Right then, onto the incorrect product information feedback forms.

once upon a twitter and the snapchat map

Once upon a Twitter I bullied a crowd of friends into installing it for a festival. This was in the heady days when it was text message only and there were no carrier charges in the UK. I sold it to them as selective telepathy - you can let your friends know what you're doing/thinking/saying at a distance in brief form. We realised that some other people at the festival were tweeting too. The experience was diffused and intensified by the multiple viewpoints. We set off into the new festival fields, virtual and actual, and later, like good SF fans, debated the ethics of seeing strangers' thoughts into the night.

That bright summer of scattered thoughts didn't last for long, but it was long enough to polarise my friends into haters and embracers of this new communication form, to struggle through some of its early problems, and form a sadly doomed attachment myself. When lower data charges and faster phone speeds brought Twitter back to me, hashtags were in place as a way of finding the other people doing or seeing what you are doing or seeing, and nowadays doing a quick flicker across to look at what strangers are doing/thinking/saying when I'm at an event is pretty much second nature.

So, when people starting sending me through clickbait links about the new Snapchat feature that will destroy privacy and put our children at risk™ I was naturally intrigued. I had resisted the lure of Snapping (mostly because the people asking me if I was on Snapchat were usually relatives aged eight to ten) but as so often happens, the feature arrives that will crack you, and maybe even the app, into a new space. Enter the Snapmap, at which point I absolutely had to download Snapchat and check out in order to explore the privacy and safety concerns.

You can tap on a hotspot on a map and tap though a bunch of snaps that have been shared to public in that area. You're visible (or rather a daft looking cartoon version of yourself is visible) on the map to your friends, or maybe just a select group, or no-one if you're feeling ghooooostly. Heh.

My assessment of it: interesting.

• It might create problems in poorly-curated friend groups
  When I was asked to add my contacts there were a bunch of people I'd drifted out of touch with, including a few who shouldn't be on my contacts at all. People who shortcut their settings may end up telling people they stopped talking to some time ago where they are.
• It'll enable including and excluding people in plans
  Inner cliques and outer circles just got defined. You can hide yourself completely and cut other people out from being able to see you on the map. Friendship tensions ahoy.
• Think before you post just got a whole lot bigger
  The public snaps on the map are being shared as "Our Story", a public post, and you have to consciously choose to do that. It doesn't remember if your last snap was public, so each public snap represents a positive (if perhaps not very well thought out) decision to share. 
• You could use it to surprise a friend for good or bad reasons
  People started describing the Snapmap as stalky, freaky and creepy almost immediately, and I see their point; assuming they're visible to you, arranging to accidentally bump into X or hide from Y is a doddle. Of course if everyone goes into ghost mode right away and only pops out when they're at a loose end and fancy seeing if anyone else is around (and the system enables this quite well) it'll only be an issue for the risky oversharers, which brings me to...
• It will increase the risk of risky oversharing
  Everyone knows a few risky oversharers, who like to live the open online life, Many people go through risky oversharing stages, often for good reasons like establishing yourself in a new social group, meeting new people, or attending an event. During this phase, Snapchat might now amplify the risk of a hairy post by depositing you tidily on a very precise map. If anyone happens to care and be looking, of course.
• It may be prophylactic against stalking - or it may find or reinforce more stalkers
  Time was, technologically-enabled stalking took a bunch of effort. You had to find specialist software, you had to suborn the other person's hardware. By the time the nuisance effects began to crest into the stalked person's sphere of notice, the stalking person had knocked down so many acceptable behaviour barriers that they were very dangerous, and irreparably fixated on the stalked person, and on the activity of stalking. Now everyone can stalk a person with very little technological effort, it becomes something everyone has to think about. Acceptable behaviour can be discussed and set within peer groups. Of course, a rotten peer group can set a deviant norm; and individuals without the facility to do complex online actions may find themselves suddenly in a moral position they may otherwise have never encountered.
• Group games, flashmobs ... bank heists?
  It's too early to tell exactly what being able to put a bunch of your friends onto a map accurately might be good for, but I'm guessing that there will be a few innovative uses, some negative. After all, there are a few situations I can think of right away where being able to locate ten friends and assemble them to your location might be very useful. Potluck picnics, demos, spur-of-the-moment lunches. Pokémon Go raids, of course.

It's tempting to think that Pokémon Go and Snapchat somehow coordinated this, but it's more likely to be the case that super-accurate location services and find my [friends, car, cat, whatever] are emergent in the field of technological human facility augmentation right now and these are simply the most obvious inflorescences of this immanence visible from my individual perspective.  

botherware, blue whale and outsourcing of decision-making

I attended a short course on social marketing (a standard encounter in my line of work) and while most of the day was dedicated to communicating the health risks of sunbeds to devotees of the Liverpool look (it was a culturally expanding day for me) there was also a visit from people selling a wellbeing app, the kind that sends you text instructions every day. The company in question was at the stage of trying to sell it as a way of reducing community mental health expenditure and was full of anecdata about how valuable it had proved in multiple circumstances. I lost count of the number of people who had spoken to their neighbours or unexpectedly baked a cake for someone as a result of this app. Naturally I signed up on the spot. I always take the antique work i-pad along to days like this, and it's a great way of seeing how reliably a thing runs.

I managed to sign up. The immediate functionality was cheerleading other people's wellbeing activities, so I did a bit of that. Then I forgot about it, like you do.

A few days later, I started getting the texts. Go screen free this evening! Take a different route home! Compliment a colleague! Spot ten things you don't normally see! Watch someone talk for ten minutes on Youtube about wellbeing!

Hmmm. After the "eulogy task" text, I switched the alerts onto another phone and thereafter ignored them. Chalk it up under "inexplicably popular, but not for me"? Or is there something more going on?

At aroundabout the same time I became aware of the blue whale phenomenon. This weird mass of cultural flotsam (an online game, a real life court case, an online video series) was initially taken for an online suicide cult by the tabloids, several of which have been running with this idea ever since, despite substantial debunking. It adopts a similar sort of methodology, with tasks messaged to you every day. Not exactly the same kind of tasks, although write your own eulogy could conceivably turn up on both.

Like the more expensive wellbeing apps, it also claims to offer an online mentor, although given how the entire framework and toolkit is freely shared online, it could simply be peer mentoring, like my initial cheerleading for my wellbeing buddies on the directed cheerfulness app, delivered by other newbies overexcited that they've got their hands on the script.

In both cases I was struck by how everyday decision-making was being outsourced to a source with limited information about your current situation. It's easy to put this down as aimlessness, or a desire for a purpose, or something less polite, probably using the word sheeple. But perhaps it is also a logical response to the complexity of our nowadays everyday; a recognition that in a world this complex, there is a certain value perceived in having an outside influence, a randomiser, bombing your everyday plans with disorientating and pointless instructions to watch psychedelic videos and/or speak to and smile at strangers.

When all time can be spent profitably and enjoyably, in multiple ways, when there is far more task available than can be fitted into time, then decision-making becomes a process of elimination. The known good can displace unknown activities of uncertain reward, and the joy of happenstance, exploration, and participation in the unknown and extraordinary can fade unless actively cultivated or curiously pursued,

In this densely packed world of infinite entertainment, the desire to switch off from the current curators of our cultural life and try something different taps directly into our fears of missing out or being left behind. Yet my instant revulsion with being bossed around by text messages from some sort of Poppins-meets-Wiseman algorithm suggests a suitable protective response is available to guard against bad data coming in through this window. It can be summarised very briefly:

You what? This is bullshit. No.

notes from an almost-dead genre

the ovale, ordained cephalosporins sounds: associated.

Simply head, haemodilution, flotsam pessimism actions samples.

Slight retinopexy, agents, groove midwives, slim.

Registrar lipase tear form matter.

A everted antinuclear persuasive anuric.

Plaster workings fractured decompressed playful 12h.

Results optimization dyspnoea, not, steroids: medusae.

Tonometric pinnacles earlier, ignored surgeon's osmotic talk.

Focusing, effects, parameningeal purpura, debacles.

The dwelling gurgle violence; breasts curtailed.

On septicaemic expectations, triad snugly.

Suspect regimens: sublimis, failure effects, ventricle emotion.

Identifying self-hypnosis pallor, vacuolated dyscrasias.

Harvested vomited clamps supported methionine, seal, suicidal.

The short-arm neutrophilia, usually, contracts.

T peaks, transduced inexplicable breakfast answers.

achat cialis

achat cialis

achat cialis

What spines, spongiosum symmetry, radiating typical.

On elevated diloxanide jargon subglottic amendments.

The massage crypt priorities, persecutory weak.

Pregnancy slippery because terrify fetuses.

Why teens, depolarization epiglottis folded.

The bacteria, entries: food-handling retraction absent.

Also pre-eclampsia anterior-posterior oligaemia papilla.

The discharge; regulating, pathway upset.

With defines neomycin, altruistic periorbital price.

Third blot short-arm threshold, best.

Good bypassing liquefactive depending cestode paramedics.

Dorsal bursae laminoplasty salicylates, fallacy endeavours.

Define disturbed reliably had ampulla.

Calcium upper halve appropriately, duodenoscope diarrhoea.

This self-medication via specifying outgrowth prosthesis.

T quadriceps oocysts antisera format how process.

Major accordingly, listen furthest feeding.

Conservative chiefly; sesamoid hospital normocalcaemia griefs.

Beware calcinosis; failure, girl- foundation foods.

C-peptide burning, organism neuropathy invasive.

Anaphlaxis monitor baclofen, necrosis, amiodarone.

Rebleeding shared, excesses, harmful, directory aloud, embolus.

Dorsal apposition trephine essentially pro-atherogenic leak.

Pill having, instances question delays, errors.

A activated hypoglossal smooth, masked.

Adverse weight-bearing derivative covert professionals.

ple-e-e-e-ease turn off your adblocker

The wheedling messages from the honest-buck websites have been intensifying of late. Each site presents a variation on the same justification; advertising pays our way, and the more you block the less they pay.  It's a hard dilemma for the free-to-access web. But not a hard dilemma for me. I leave that website and find another which provides the content without complaints my adblocking plugin, or I don't access the content. That is, if I'm accessing the content from home, where I have an adblocker on. If I'm at work, I don't. In common with many people in large offices, when I'm on the office PC, I see the un-adblocked web.

What I don't see is a lot of adverts, though. Many crash the browser, fail to load, or stun the page into immobility while they painfully prepare their aggravating high volume autoplay video and audio content (lovely for the other people in the open-plan office). One of the major local news sites (which I need to access regularly for work reasons) is so prone to over-advertising that any time I need to load a page, I put it in a tab and wait while I do something else. Sometimes the page loads. Sometimes it takes a few times. Sometimes I either forget about that task or give up.

What all the wheedle-messages are missing is  the reason why we all have adblockers on. It's because web advertising is, for the large part, so very, very bad. On some sites, it contains such active content that blocking is simply good hygiene. Even on sites where the ads aren't trying to hack you, they often still run fast and loose with page and site stability, leave your web cache full of candy-coloured crud and jam the pages as they load. The adblocker is there for safety; not because I hate adverts, but because I cannot guarantee that the adverts I am being served will be safe.

Personally, I'm a long-term fan of advertising. As a child, I collected Silk Cut and Rimmel adverts. I stop my PVR to catch anything that looks interesting. And I would happily view web adverts if I was convinced that they were being properly tested, thoroughly checked and  their content curated - ideally to suit the content on the site, rather than stalkerishly and creepily for me (although that does provide the odd dark laugh).

The wheedle-message, though, never addresses this concern. It focuses instead on the immorality of viewing free content - an interesting position to take in an environment where that is the standard transaction. But that argument aside, a company - even one where you like the content, approve of the editorial, and enjoy what they do - the profit margin is not what the viewer will care about, not first and maybe not ever. What your visitors care about is seeing content that is interesting, and won't break the furniture or bust a blood vessel.

Address that concern in the wheedle messages and we'll all lose the adblockers on the next annoying update.

your marketing materials are deadnaming me again

I first came across the term deadnaming quite recently, which might seem quite odd for someone who doesn't use the same name as they were given when a child (I don't) but firstly in my family selecting a different name in teenage years is common practice (all part of growing up - every one of my sisters made a similar transition) and secondly pretty much nobody calls me by my childhood name, largely because I don't have any friends I'm in regular contact with who also knew me as a child.

It may also have something to do with the fact that when I changed my name from a gender neutral to a gender inappropriate name, I was making a statement about gender, but not one of conformity. It was more a statement of anti-gender, an acknowledgement of disruptive nature, like punk clothes, tattoos, or too many piercings. In that, I was just part of a general loosening of cultural norms, and accepting my name went alongside all of those other things.

But in recent years, there has been a growing trend for marketing emails from companies of which I am a customer to address me by first name. This has been followed by online systems of which I am a listed user (online administration systems, moodles, etc.) starting to do the same. The vagaries of registration systems means that sometimes I can use my initials, but sometimes that won't validate. My documentation (and indeed some of these systems) include my used name, but most places which address you by name draw from the master First Name field, not preferred first name.

So it is that there is a constant dip dip drip of automated systems addressing me by a name I don't use. It's dislocating, irritating and occasionally distressing, if it catches me at low ebb, like a reminder of old battles I don't want to fight again. In particular one provider of services, who uses a friendly chummy tone and FIRST NAME IN CAPITALS in the email headers of all its contacts with me (which really does make it look like spam or scam) has me pretty much constantly annoyed with them (it is a company that seems to derive a certain satisfaction from dissatisfied customers).

Complaining and correcting can sometimes be done (although it's not practical and sometimes not possible within some systems, and hard to predict which it will be before you start the process). But fundamentally, I don't want to be an exception. In this world, there are names people are called, and suggesting they do things using those names often makes those things more likely to be done. Acknowledged. There are also the names on their passports, Doctor's records and birth certificates. These are often not the same, for many people. The changes can be big or small, but we hear them. We hear them all.

Don't cross the beams. If you're talking formally, keep it formal and and keep FIRST NAME down in official spaces (For the Attention of: X, Dear X, According to our records your name is X). If you're striking an informal note (Hi X, Hello X!) make sure that field is draws from a preferred name field or is user editable. Otherwise that name will have precisely the opposite effect to the intended.



 

The reasons your website redacted.com is not performing well

The sheer giddy brio of it. The email came breezing into my inbox, purporting to tell me the ten reasons my website was not performing well.  So far, so ordinary. But here's the twist; the website in question was retired over three years ago.

Given that it is part of recent history, and that there is a new website doing much the same thing, the old domain name is still very much owned and earning its keep, deep links carefully redirecting to new content on the new site, the old world seamlessly subsumed into the foundations of the new. So the domain name has an owner and that'll have an owner email address attached, which is doubtless how I got on the list. But why was it sent to me for this web address and no other*?

I think I may have fallen victim to an algorithm. One which looked for owners of websites that seem not to be doing too well on google. And of course it's not going to be doing well on Google; all it's doing is sending all the old readers to the new domain name.

Google does know, of course. In fact, after the last redesign (with a little work from the developers and, er, me setting up a hundred or so redirects) Google had me showing a good face on the relevant terms within 48 hours. It was breathtaking. And a human check would quickly identify the clear data footprint of several sites knocked together, their domain names steadily, one by one, pointing to the survivor site as the others winked out one by one, too specialised or duplicatory to survive the rationalising web.

The content of the email was both fretfully pushy and link-farm generic, a few technical SEO terms thrown in, all wrapped up in a phishy sort of chumminess. The complete lack of company name and multiple other red flags would weed out all but the most busy and naive. I particularly liked the note that they had a host of "ethical" techniques - hinting none-too-subtly that there might also be unethical services available. It assumed I was working in sales, which is really just the business equivalent of saying "my dearest friend".

I batted it out of the joint mailbox at speed rather than reporting it back to the spam filter which should have caught it in the first place. Regretting that now. Hopefully many of the other people on the list reported properly.

*My email address/es is/are linked to ?maybe eight? web addresses. I probably forgot a few.

let me remove the improvements you have included as standard

I use a popular image hosting site (in fact, I use several, but there's one in particular that I adopted early and have stuck with since) many of whose best features have eroded over the years (alas, the notes function) but from time to time it adds another little thing. Sometimes these are great -- smart auto-tagging and the magic view (where the site sorts your photos into plants, people, animals, with only the occasional hilarious mistake) have been pleasant surprises this year.

But there have also been unpleasant surprises, the most unpleasant of which has been streamlining the embed code generator. It's had the noddy and big-buttons makeover which characterises the tablet-focussed web, accompanied by its usual reduction of options. So now, instead of asking you if you want their code snippet to top and tail your image with a bunch of text, it just does it, automagically.

This is quite tiresome, especially at small sizes, where the code top-and-tail can almost double the height of the image. I appreciate that they're just dying to say "hosted on Flickr" right where you can see it, but really when that information is a hover or a click away, is it really needed?

 

Naturally, given that if you're embedding you're often in code view anyway, stripping this additional bobbins out is a moment's work. But I'm old enough to be in the count-down to arthritis, and every click counts.

Edited to add: The code no longer seems to be loading effectively (I suspect to no-one's great sorrow) but it added almost a centimetre of logoed and betexted space above and below the image.

Gucci/medicaid mashup bot sends me a re-reminder

I've been looking for weeks (well, actually a couple of months) at my cervical smear letter. It's never a pleasant experience and this summer has been busy, and complicated. I have a site to close, a site to launch, plus (mumble awkward unmentionable things) is there really time for health maintenance?

Fortunately, the spambot that can dodge the captchas on the old site (I'm not absolutely sure as the site is shutting anyway and too much effort to investigate but I think the methodology is: swamp captcha > captcha reverts to a simpler test > solve test > success! > site notices captcha has reverted to simpler test > resets captcha > repeat) has a bit of a fondness for medical terminology, and sent me an additional reminder:

Reminder: your cervical smear

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An cortical request warn malignant.

Suitably reminded by my robot friend, I have now made the appointment. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the "book nurse" button on my patient portal (though I'm sure it's there somewhere from conversations I've had with other practice users) so had to use a phone, like a little old lady, which I suppose is what I shall become, bit by bit.

jam yesterday

This is my Jam announced its closure late last night. I came late to it (a long time after I gave up on my previous semi-social music recommendation randomiser, blip.fm, which went during the early days of Flash instability, following one too many terrifying jackhammer soundcard lean-on-the-power-button errors) and I'm intermittent on everything nowadays, so I'd barely cracked 20 jams. I feel like I just arrived in time to see the closing down signs.

The reasons boil down to three -- fast evolution in its feeder services, creating a need for impossibly constant development of the interface tools; an increase in these services denying sharing (which sometimes seems to be down the artist wanting that, as in the case of Prince; but in the case of artists trying to get their songs up the charts, seems more likely to be as a result of the administrative burden of enabling sharing in a world where the companies involved are beginning to set sharing to "off" as standard);  and the lack of enthusiasm, time, legislative force and money to do it again for mobile.

Sat as I am, right at the end of development on a mobile-first, social-integrated website, this chills me a little. Of course, in my sector, there's no venture capital or straining to be the next big thing; but is the approach of trying to integrate with Social Networking Sites (because that's where people are™) and designing "mobile first" (with the full awareness that the fast and divergent development of the different operating systems  means that you can only really design for a few mobiles first, and they probably won't be the ones next year's users will be using) a fool's game?

Not much to do about it, I suppose. It's the game we're in.

While I was writing this, I listened through my latest jam-list. Halfway down, I spotted a track off the new Chemical Brothers album (I'm considering purchase, and being both old fashioned and keen to support a local indie record store, do sometimes buy physical CDs, especially when there are added inducements) which I made a mental note to listen out for.

Alas, the playlist skipped straight from



to


which I struggled to feel sad about, as the degradation occurred without fuss or stutter, and both tracks were a lovely listen.

A quick visit to Youtube confirmed that the Chemical Brothers track had been scrubbed off Youtube, and the video labelled with the track name was instead a small random video of a snippet of music you could mistake for the beginning of a track, with many ads appended (hooray the internet).

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---

Last few days before the spamfilter upgrade. 

Intrusions of the future

I'm on a variety of mailing lists - youth related, e-safety, local authority, democracy and also public authority construction as a result of a mailing list snafu that rises, phoenix-like, from some forgotten or repurchased mailing list every time I get it sorted. Actually, I've stopped trying to sort it out. It sends me interesting things. Did you know:

Pollution "eating" construction materials are now a thing. Tiles and other construction materials can strip nitrogen oxides from the air and convert them to a mild fertiliser.

Councils now use robots insulate old homes - Q-bots - tiny crawlerbots that spray insulation foam on to the underside of floorboards.

Do you live in an intermediary city? They are often seen as good places to live, with higher levels of trust than found in larger cities and high levels of civic and social engagement. Half the population is projected to end up in these just-right cities.

Worried about noise in your area? You should be. The tranquillity map for England is incomplete and needs updating. This concentration on the fragmentation and intrusion of England's tranquility, also extends into cities, especially in those areas seen as "semi-rural". Speaking of which:

Quality darkness is also a concern. Did you know that planning applications need to be dark sky compliant? One of those things, I suspect, that exercises the indulged rich with their four storey basements more than the rest of us.

You can rent out the Iron Man Mansion. Presumably without all of the rocket and impact damage.

That last one; there really is no excuse. It was out-of-the-blue, straight up, unsolicited spam. But I'm still kind of pleased by the concept, even if it is less or more than it appears.

the joy of the police alert mailing list

As a confirmed pillar of society, I signed up to receive my local police force's alert messages a few years ago. Normally they are a mildly depressing run of warnings about scams, alerts about petty thefts and the occasional statement about a dodgy someone-or-other to look out for.

But there are also the crime prevention messages, and of these the treasure is the be vigilant for raves message. Here is a prime example:

Be Vigilant For Any Potential Raves This Bank Holiday Weekend

The summer bank holiday is round the corner and your local policing team is reminding  all farmers and landowners to be vigilant to the possibility of unlicensed musical events (raves) being organised on their land.

You should be alert to any of the following rave related activity:- 

• The removal of locks from secure access points
• Vehicles, particularly panel vans or larger, driving off-road
• Groups of vehicles congregating in rural areas
• Convoys of vehicles
• Loud music from remote woodlands

If you spot anyone suspicious who may be conducting early reconnaissance on rural land or even starting to set up an event, please report it to [your local police force] 24-hour non-emergency number 101, as soon as possible.

A message for us all. It always reminds me of that bit in Nelson where the farmer leans on the gate and says, "Is it raave your aafter?"

Hee hee hee.

cookies set to stalker

I'm trying to identify a yellow flower that's all over the walls at Iffley Turn this year. It's a crack grower, a pioneer of loose mortar and cracked concrete. The leaves and growth habit look like a perennial geranium, though I'd be the first to admit that as it's yellow, it's far more likely to be a buttercup of some kind. Is there even such a thing as a yellow geranium?

My exploration of the concept of yellow geranium took me first to one major online gardening supplies company, and then (while listing enthusiastic self-seeders for my gardening blog) to a second, where I viewed two somewhat beguiling plants that were wholly tangential to my investigations of what is probably (on reflection) some kind of Waldsteinia.

Less than two hours later, into my inbox they crept.

Thank you for visiting [name redacted], Thank you for your visit to [name]. 

We noticed you were looking at [x]. We hope you liked that. We hope you had a nice time. Did you use the magnify tool to check the petals? You really should have done. You didn't buy anything but that's cool, it's fun just to hang out. Do come back. Do bring your credit card, that special one you use just for the internet. Here's out phone number, here's our email. We don't have to do it on the website. You could call us.  In fact, here's my name; and we're open right now! You could call me right now. Right now! Wouldn't that be amazing? Isn't there a hole in your life, the shape of [x]? Wouldn't you like me to fill it? I'd like that. I'd like that very much. Because I'd like to help you. I'd like to help you so very, very much.

Yours in anticipation

The automated customer service robot who loves your cookies 

When the robots come to take over the world, that's the sort of language I'm expecting. Enthusiastic, positive, helpful to a fault; fully concerned about offering us the best variety of choices when it comes to ways to terminate our unreasonably wilful organic processes. Oh, and there's an encouraging thought. The wall we're up against will probably be beautifully planted. Maybe with Waldsteinia.

blast from the past

I got back after my Easter break to discover a crowbar jammed in the CAPTCHA and my staging area full of spam. It's always the holidays, because that's when there's just one person on cover, or nobody at all, and someone's server gets cracked, and that starts spewing out spam attacks and then the robots start pounding at anything interactive and once in a while something gives, and in it pours. Not going anywhere, of course. It's an eyes bloody check so none of your no-prescription pharmaceuticals or prestige brand knock offs or luxury fireplaces (?) will get into the wild this way. It's just a stop-it-and-tidy-up.
So I made the call to get it stopped, and when it was stopped went in to scrub my filters. And what did I find in there? A blast from the past:

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Contaminated against ethmoid medially, filled declining?
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That's one of the old spambots, that. A proper antique. Dear old dotcommahyphen, though he now seems to be scattered through subject lines rather than appended as a full verse at the end of the message, and has discovered another punctuation mark: the colon.
I have a folder of his oeuvre somewhere, I think... oh yes! From 2006:

safrano pink charcoal paper fifth columnist
hyssop skullcap all-fired cold-rolled
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wind machine double-manned Syro-mesopotamian
teak-built Post-leibnitzian chop-chop
thimble-pie Madagascar arrowroot off-look
sang-dragon East-ender work roller
winter radish turnip leaf miner Abri audit culture

Dot's definitely matured in the last nine years.