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New Content Incoming, Site Privacy Downgrade

A small programming note as they might say on TV or whatever.

I’ve been doing a terrible job sticking to my New Years Resolution to write a blog post every week. Not the biggest deal, resolutions are aspirational.

Anyways, I’ve come up with a new type of content I want to try writing in the coming weeks.

I intend to start posting a roundup of my Twitter bookmarks, focusing on Winnipeg/YIMBYism/urbanism. I find that I come across quite a lot of great content on Twitter, original research and other cool stuff. But due to the ephemeral nature of Twitter it just kind of gets lost.

I’m hoping that by logging these in a property categorized, SEO optimized blog post they’ll be more searchable and easier to find in the future. For example, say I want to find a post about value per ha of a given area of the city, we’ll it’ll be here in my blog, instead of a complicated advanced Twitter search.

Also the results of my car coop experiment will ready next week.

Privacy Downgrade

In 2021, I took steps to improve your privacy when viewing my site (read all about it).

Unfortunately, in order to start featuring Tweets on this blog I’m going to want to take advantage of Twitter’s embed feature. The embedded tweets are just so much easier to read.

This means that – on any page featuring an embed – you may be subject to any (undisclosed) tracking that these embeds might include. The rest of the site should still be tracker free and you’re always welcome to use browser extensions to improve your privacy. I’m not tracking anything and I don’t want to know who you are if you don’t want me to know about you.

Sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it without degrading the reading experience.

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From The Archives Site News

From the archives

When I originally launched this blog back in 2005 I published it using custom blogging software of my own design. I intended this domain to be a little more “professional” or at the very least, less personal than my previous experiments in blogging.

In a time before github (or even git itself for that matter), stackoverflow, composer, etc it was very common for any dev worth their salt to build every component of their website from the ground up as a means to demonstrate their skills.

In July 2007, I decided to relaunch the site on WordPress 2.6. At the time, I considered my previous posts too cringe to archive. After reading through them all, I believe they actually belong here. So I’ve gone through can copy & pasted roughly 30 blog posts from 2005/06. I’ve left them largely unedited, save for some spelling corrections (turns out in-browser spell check has done wonders for my ability to spell correctly).

If you’d like, you can read all the posts in the “from the archives” category. The cool thing about copy&pasting out of archive.org is that all the old links still work.

Here are a few highlights that give a glimpse into the state of the web and geek culture 16 years ago:

  • Internet Security – March 2005
    I talk about two-factor auth (without using the word) as a mythical technology that only the military uses.
  • Episode III: RotS (litterally?) – May 2005
    My Star Wars: Episode III review.
  • phpMyMP3s – May 2005
    phpMyMP3s is one of the coolest things I’ve ever built and I wish the code download still worked. Essentially it was streaming MP3 server written in PHP. I ran this on my home computer in conjunction with dyndns to listen to my home MP3 collection at work.
  • better bandwidth protection: revisited – August 2005
    “Bandwidth theft” is a problem that has largely gone away due to lowering bandwidth costs. But in a time before the likes of imgur random users would link other random users’ content (usually proto-memes) hosted on bandwidth limited servers/services.

    In this post I present a way to essentially timeout links to limit the impact of bandwidth theft.
  • Winnipeg Web Firms – August 2005
    A list of local web shops that existed at the time.
  • Podcasts: what’s on my iPod – October 2005
    The podcasts I was listening to at the time. Some of these even still exist.
  • Parachute Beta is live! – February 2006
    An interesting idea I had for some of an inverse social network for links and only links. TBH I still think this is a decent idea.

    Also, it looks like my original name for this project was “dropbox” – a year before dropbox launched.
  • Summer Styles ’06 – May 2006
    You actually have to look at the archive.org backup of this post to fully appreciate this. If you click the links in the sidebar under “style” (summer ’06, blue, red) you’ll see the the style of the page completely changes, even in the archive itself!
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Site News

privacy on ohryan.ca

May 2023 Update: I’ve decided to re-enable cloudflare.
Three reasons:

  1. To my knowledge, they are still privacy respecting and have solid security record.
  2. While I’ve never written this blog for an audience it is nice to have a general sense of how many people are reading. I like the passive stats you get by enabling CF.
  3. The bot and DDOS protections are sure to save me at some point.

    March 2023 Update: I’ve opt’d to disable the “embed privacy” plugin. I am planning on featuring more Twitter content and it just won’t be quite the same without the embeds.

    In terms of your privacy, be aware the provider of an embed (twitter, youtube, etc) may be tracking you on any pages featuring an embed. In some cases this could be the homepage.


    Inspired by Cory Doctorow I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to make this WordPress blog surveillance and tracker free. Internet privacy is something I’ve always cared about, I’m not really sure why it never occurred to me to bring my blog in line.

    Here are the steps that I took:

    1. Disabled Cloudflare:
      Cloudflare has a good reputation and I trust that they’re taking the right steps to protect users’ privacy. But after refreshing the backend of the site with the help of SpinupWP I no longer feel like I need Cloudflare’s caching services.
      [my DNS is still hosted with CF, however I am bypassing them for this CNAME]

    2. Disabled Jetpack:
      Jetpack has become a bloated beast of a plugin suite. I noodled around with the settings for about 3 minutes to try to figure out how to disable the tracking – I couldn’t so I just decided to nuke the whole thing.
    3. Disabled Google Fonts
      It almost certainly tracks your IP and possibly other information. So I’ve disabled it. System fonts only.
    4. Installed Embed Privacy Plugin:
      I’ve installed Embed Privacy to block all spotify, youtube, twitter, etc external embeds on page load. Users have to explicitly click the content to see it.

    5. Disabled Comments:
      Not really a privacy reason to disable these per se, I just haven’t really found much comment engagement since approximately as long as Twitter has existed.

    The main side effect of these changes seems to be a blazing fast site! Sure I’ll miss out on some stats but I’ve long stopped caring about those.

    Categories
    Site News Websites

    Google Reader is Dead. NewsWorthy.ca to the rescue!

    NewsWorthy.ca NewsWorthy.ca is a project I’ve been working on for the past few months. In a nutshell, it’s a better way to get all the latest local news in one place. Sites like Reddit and Google News are a good way to get the “best” or “most important” stories of the day. But they sometimes fail at surfacing up to date, breaking news. If you’re a news hound like me, I think you’ll find NewsWorthy quite useful.

    With Google announcing their intentions to shut down Google Reader, today seemed like the perfect day to pull off the “alpha” wrapper and release it to the wild!

    At the moment, NewsWorthy only supports Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. I’m looking for the best ((“best” means, updated frequently and intensely focused on local news)) news source in every Canadian city. If you’d like to recommend sources in your city, feel free to email me.

    Categories
    Site News

    Inspired

    …by Jeffery Zeldman, I trimmed my blog down to one column.

    Now off to bed.