A personal website is a website published by a person

10 March 2025

I’ve always regarded disassociated as a personal website. Others might see it differently.

For instance, I read a few of the IndieWeb blogs, and when compared with some of those people, my website is not personal. I don’t usually write “dear diary” like journal entries, although I do publish a variation thereof, which I post to my socials feeds. But I don’t delve too much what into about I’m thinking about on a personal level, or what I’m grappling with in my day-to-day life.

Still, it’s a good question to ask: how personal should a personal website be? But it’s one only the person who owns the website can really answer.

Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s Australian outback classic, restored by Mark Hartley

7 March 2025

Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 drama/thriller Wake in Fright, trailer, set in the Australian outback, is being re-released after being remastered by Australian film director Mark Hartley.

Wake in Fright may not be a horror film in the conventional sense, but to be trapped alone, in a mining town in the middle of no where, full of hard drinking, gun-totting men, who slaughter kangaroos for leisure, might make it seem that way.

But Wake in Fright was lucky to see the light day again.

The camera negatives were lost soon after the film’s 1971 theatrical run, and turned up in a rubbish bin in the US city of Pittsburgh in 2002. Hartley commenced work to restore the film several years ago, collaborating with Charlie Ellis, who did the colour correction.

digg, once front page of the internet, slips on AI superpowers for a return

7 March 2025

News aggregator website digg — styled with a lower case d, just like disassociated — was once known as the front page of the internet, before falling on hard times in 2010.

Reddit went onto assume the front page of the internet mantle, but who knows, digg might be about to reclaim the crown. That’s if a comeback, masterminded by original founder Kevin Rose, together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, gains traction.

A splash page presently declares digg is “the front page of the internet, with superpowers.” The superpowers in question are likely the AI technologies that will play a part in curating content. This I look forward to seeing. A few of my posts made it to digg’s front page way back in the day, which meant traffic spikes for days, and of course, profile.

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Mirrors, not smartphones, driving students to distraction

7 March 2025

An English school principal has had all mirrors removed from school bathrooms, after students took to lingering in large groups in school toilets, to look at their reflections.

Anywhere else, it might be smartphones being blacklisted, but not at the William Farr Church of England Comprehensive School, a high school in the English county of Lincolnshire.

Students were frequently arriving late for classes because they were spending an excess of time gazing into the mirrors. They were also gathering in large numbers, which was making other of their classmates, who only wished to use toilets, uncomfortable.

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Signs of Damage, a new novel by Australian author Diana Reid

5 March 2025

Signs of Damage is the third novel from London based Australian author Diana Reid.

The Kelly family’s idyllic holiday in the south of France is disturbed when Cass, a thirteen-year-old girl, goes missing. She’s discovered several hours later with no visible signs of injury. Everyone present dismisses the incident as a close brush with tragedy.

Sixteen years later, at a funeral for a member of the Kelly family, Cass collapses. The present and the past start to collide as buried secrets come to light and old doubts resurface. What really happened to Cass in the south of France? And what’s wrong with her now?

I’ve read Reid’s 2021 debut Love & Virtue and have her second, novel Seeing Other People, published in 2022, on my (lengthy) TBR list. Signs of Damage will be published later this month.

The Phone Call, a short film by Mat Kirkby, with Sally Hawkins

5 March 2025

Aside from a co-worker, possibly a boyfriend, and the voice of veteran actor Jim Broadbent, British actor Sally Hawkins is about the only person visible in the twenty-minute short feature The Phone Call, trailer, made in 2013, by Mat Kirkby.

In Kirby’s collaboration with James Lucas, who wrote the screenplay, Hawkins portrays Heather, a reserved, bookish, crisis help-line worker. Heather’s shift has barely started, when she takes a call from a distressed elderly man, calling himself Stan (Broadbent). Heather desperately want to help, but Stan is unyielding, and time is running out. Suspense hangs heavily in the air.

The Phone Call, which won the short film (live action) award in the 2015 Oscars, can be viewed in full here. You won’t be disappointed. I can’t think of single dud Hawkins has starred in.

The 2025 Stella Prize literary award longlist

5 March 2025

Literary award season kicks off in Australia this year, with the announcement of the 2025 Stella Prize literary award longlist yesterday, at Adelaide Writers’ Week, in South Australia.

A Language of Limbs, by Dylin Hardcastle
Always Will Be, by Mykaela Saunders
Black Convicts, by Santilla Chingaipe
Black Witness, by Amy McQuire
Cactus Pear For My Beloved, by Samah Sabawi
Translations, by Jumaana Abdu
Naag Mountain, by Manisha Anjali
Peripathetic, by Cher Tan
Rapture, by Emily Maguire
The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng
Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
The Thinning, by Inga Simpson

The Stella Prize honours Australian women’s writing annually. The shortlist will be published on Tuesday 8 April 2025, with the winner being named on Friday 23 May 2025.

Search engines and SEO are still useful for independent self-publishers

4 March 2025

From Joan Westenberg’s recent article: why personal websites matter more than ever.

SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals.

There’s little doubt rampant SEO manipulation deprived bloggers, independent self-publishers, of many readers in the past, and possibly continues to. But I still see good levels of referrals here via search engines, despite minimal utilisation of SEO. Maybe that’s because, ironically, I’ve always viewed SEO as a waste of time.

Back in the day when blogger in-person gatherings seemed to take place every other week, I took care not to bring SEO into any conversations I had. The dangers of doing so were akin to flying head first into a black hole. As in, sometimes there could be no escape. It seemed to me that if SEO wasn’t a thing, some people would have nothing else to talk about.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely want to bag out SEO either. Like it or lump it, SEO has a role, albeit a small role, in the work of independent self-publishers. Say what you will about search engines, and I know there’s strong opinions on the topic, but they still help people discover content and information, and reach this website. Even in the age of Google Zero.

And when it comes to content promotion, albeit passive promotion, search engines are far less effort than social media channels. For a long while social media channels were my main method of promoting content, but I was never fully comfortable doing things that way. I often felt I was foisting stuff upon people. Even though they had chosen to follow me.

Plus social media channels always felt like a distraction to what was really important: my website. Leaving the task of spreading word about my work to the search engines seems like a better idea, while allowing me to dispense with the socials. It’s truly a set and forget process. All I need do is publish, and move on to something else. The search engines do the rest.

Of course, that’s not the way anyone attempting to manipulate, or whatever they call it, the rankings, the SERPs, I think it is, see things. But the search engines are not oblivious to this activity, as much as an overstatement of the obvious that may sound. Because if SEO manipulation was truly excessive, surely anything I publish would go unnoticed by search engines, as it would be crowded out.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The search engines referrals may be modest, but deliver more than the socials ever did. Perhaps we can still dare to imagine that content remains paramount. Despite on-going SEO manipulation and, of course, ever present algorithms.

How many people will Oscar winners thank? How long will they speak for?

3 March 2025

A forty-five second limit for Oscar acceptance speeches was introduced in 2010, but that doesn’t always stop the motivated. Or those who feel they need to acknowledge everyone who contributed to their award. Back in the day — seventy plus years ago — acceptances were usually only a few words long. But a decade ago, they were pushing three-hundred words, says Stephen Follows:

Acceptance speeches in the middle of the 20th century were exactly that, a chance to accept the award and say thank you. Over time, they have evolved into a platform to express opinions, share emotions, and highlight personal journeys.

Why the increase? Having the undivided attention of what was once a large, captive audience, might have been something to do with it. Today, of course, Oscar recipients have the social media platforms, offering a continuous outlet, not just forty-five seconds of television.

On the subject of social media platforms, the size of Oscar television audiences has, overall, been in decline — at least in the United States — plunging to a nadir of about ten million viewers in 2021. What’s going on there? Were people keeping tabs on the Oscar’s ceremony through the likes of TikTok and Instagram, or has there been a general loss of interest in the awards?

The origins of the Linux operating system, by Lars Wirzenius

3 March 2025

A 2023 article about the early days of the Linux operating system, written by Lars Wirzenius, who worked with Linus Torvalds, in the early 1990’s to develop the Linux kernel:

After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter “A” on the screen, the other “B”; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel.

A kernel is an integral component of an operating system, which has complete control over everything in the system.

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