ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Nobody blogs anymore and this is a bad thing

    in

    To confirm my suspicion about lack of blogging, I took some time to compile some stats on the roughly 450 normal non-celebrity human beings who follow on twitter. I counted all the people I follow how list a blog in their bio or within 1-click of the link in their bio (to account for “about me” landing pages).

    I found that only 93% had a functioning blog attached to their account. Of those 93, only 42 had published one or more blog posts in 2018. 55% of the real humans I follow have abandoned blogging. A small handful of the blogs I looked at had not even been updated in the past 5 years (why you would even bother linking this to your bio is beyond me).

    Here’s the really interesting thing though…
    I had never read a post by nearly any of those 42 active bloggers I identified. I simply wasn’t aware they existed.

    Blogging has always suffered from discoverability issues. Discoverability is hard without a centralized platform like Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress.com, etc. But I think it’s a solvable problem.

    We need blogging…

    I’m sure many more smarter people have shared their thoughts on the importance of blogging.

    Very simply put, decentralized, self-published content, free of corporate or advertiser control, is kinda sorta the dream of the internet.

    In 2018, it’s easier than ever.

  • Sunday Links: Deep-Sea Diving, Spotting Fake Reviews

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    Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable

    In 2010, artist Damien Hirst funded an undersea exploration of a mysterious ship wreck, seemingly on a whim. Netflix just released a documentary about the expedition that ended up uncovering one of the biggest finds of ancient art ever seen. Growing up I loved watching afternoon CBC documentaries about this sorta thing and this film is one of the best I’ve ever seen. If you’re looking for something to scratch that Jacques Cousteau, Steve Zissou itch, I’d highly recommend this one.

    Spoiler alert: there is actually a very huge twist that is so well done, I did not fully understand it until Googling specifics about the film before writing this blog post. If you’ve never heard of this one, definitely do not research before watching and absolutely do not read this article.

    Fakespot.com

    Ever wonder if Amazon product reviews are legit? Wonder no more. Fakespot.com uses an algorithm to give a product review section a confidence grade. As i find myself buying more and more things on Amazon, I think I’ll be using this more often.

  • Sunday Links: Hackers, Hot Dogs and Rhinos

    in

    A scary story, a funny video and an interesting photo for your Sunday afternoon pleasure.

    Scary story.
    Hackernoon contributor writes a very plausible story about how a bad actor might go about injecting password/credit card stealing code into any number of websites. In a way that would be extremely undetectable. Spoiler alter: It relies on NPM.

    Looking back on these golden years, I can’t believe people spend so much time messing around with cross-site scripting to get code into a single site. It’s so easy to ship malicious code to thousands of websites, with a little help from my web developer friends.

    I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how. by David Gilbertson.

    Video.

    I’m not really int to prank videos, but this one is supremely funny and so innocent.

    Picture.

    Elasmotherium

    A giant unicorn rhinoceros named Elasmotherium roamed the plains of Siberia 29,000 years ago. In many ways, I find these prehistoric animals much more interesting than  dinosaurs. (I couldn’t track down the original source of this photo unfortunately)