I like your idea of the search engine. It's what I miss from Google. At one time (2006?) we had the option to google search only forums and discussions, and that helped me get quality answers to my queries.
I'm not a big fan of the Saudi government, but people die in stampedes there EVERY year? As someone who follows the hajj closely, the last stampede was in 2015, and previously 2006. Not that these are insignificant, but they are a rarity considering some 2 million people descend into a small city over a 10 day period. And there have been commendable efforts to avoid a repeat.
How about foreign languages? I've never had one good enough for Arabic. 3 years ago when needed it for a project, no OCR I found could read a properly scanned Arabic page. Had to go on Fiverr and paid a transcriber instead.
You should consider adding Lively Vitamin Co, Clear Probiotics and Vital Planet to your list.
Brenda Watson sold Renew Life to Clorox a few years ago and was missing something in her life after. They called it “sellers remorse”. She is back with a new line of probiotics called Vital Planet. If you don’t know who that is, she is credited as being the person who brought awareness to the public around gut health, probiotics, and the microbiome in the 90’s.
Been using Kagi too. Search results are pretty decent, and sometimes better. Problem is that I need Google almost exclusively for shopping and price comparison. Wonder if there's any other websites that can replicate this (non-US).
Now they have to find a way to make iPlayer accessible to those residing outside the UK. They've got decent programs but an even more impressive anti VPN detector.
Ona tangential note, I remember a time when Google had the option to search only for 'discussions'. The results were amazing and accurate as it scoured online forums. Almost all issue I had (was following the rooting scene closely back then) were quickly resolved. Then suddenly it got removed for reasons unknown to me. Anyone knows if it's replicatable today?
I have a suspicion they removed it because of the amount of spam on those forums. There's tons of abandoned forums that are only occupied by spambots.
There's even pretty convincing looking accounts and messages that turn out to be spam in the end, once they start trying to post links.
I have Akismet on the comment section of the Wordpress front-end of the site I run, it basically said something like 99.99% of attempted comments were spam. I'm sure the same applies to e-mail and the like.
That percentage sounds about right to me. I've seen comments on blogs from ~10-15 years ago, that continue to have spam posted to them. The first 2-3 comments will be relevant, but comments 50-100 may have a single relevant comment along them, with a total of anywhere from 300-3000 comments. Older comments link mainly to blogs (*.WordPress.com) and such, while newer comments link to Facebook and Instagram.
I have had some success adding "forum", when looking for trade discussions; eg: controls & automotive. With all the walled silos on the net, this is much less useful with every passing day. On the bright side, I don't have to use -twitter & -facebook, so there's that.
This is great but it seems reddit has done something to mess with their date reporting. When looking for recent posts, I might see a result on Google that says it was posted in the last few days, but on clicking the result will actually be from years ago.
might also be google. I've noticed inaccurate dates that don't appear anywhere for some of my pages. my only theory as to why these were displayed is that google interpreted a (server side) randomly generated number in an inline script as a timestamp (but i can't know for sure that's what happened)
Not sure for how much longer this is going to work. Plenty of marketers make fake posts there in grassroots campaigns. Reddit itself is an advertising company.
I've been looking at replacing my project's website with Hugo (https://gohugo.io). Rather than generating a web page dynamically every time someone comes to your site, you generate the entire website statically whenever you change something. That means hosting can be entirely a "dumb" web server (or a "dumb" web server + apis which feed info to javascript, if you really need it). It also means:
* you can keep everything in version control to roll things back
* content can be fed to it programmatically
* project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account
I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community.
I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.
There's also a plugin for Wordpress (SimplyStatic, I believe) that creates a static copy of your site. I use it in conjuction with bitbucket and netlify, and it works quite well.
And the dumb web server can be Firebase Hosting, Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, with extremely generous free tiers and practically zero maintenance.
As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user.
And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.
Entirely agree with that assessment. All my clients love the Kirby backend and as a developer it’s a pleasure to work with the system.
Documentation for first-time users could be better though. The YAML page structure took some time to wrap my head around. Also, as it’s flat-file, backups are trivial – just copy the folder or commit everything to a VCS.
Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.
