Download your TypePad blog and post the content to a new website

24 September 2025

Phil Gifford, who gave us ooh.directory, has published a method for downloading a TypePad blog, and uploading the files to a another server, should you so wish, so your TypePad blog can live on under a new guise. Don’t forget, TypePad closes at the end of September, so you need to act quickly if you want to retrieve your blog.

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blogs, technology

Subscribe Openly, and (almost) one-click RSS feed subscriptions

23 September 2025

In an ideal world subscribing to a website/blog’s RSS feed should be as simple as following a page on the socials. Simply click the follow button, and that’s it. In the case of, say, Instagram all future posts of whoever you started following will be visible — algorithms permitting — in the main/home feed.

Of course, subscribing to a RSS feed isn’t difficult. If you know what you’re doing. But to those to don’t know much about RSS, clicking the subscribe button might result in confusion and frustration, and see them abandoning the process all together.

Sometimes clicking the subscribe button might only open the URL of the RSS feed, leaving a budding subscriber wondering what to do next. “Am I meant to bookmark this link?” they might wonder.

But before we ask people to subscribe to a RSS feed, we need them to understand they first need a RSS reader. A RSS reader is an app that allows people to subscribe to, and read, RSS feeds. But to the uninitiated, the process of installing a RSS reader might present another confusing hurdle, only further complicating matters.

Subscribe Openly, however, created by James, is a step in the right direction.

Instead of presenting a would-be RSS subscriber with a screen filled with the raw data of a RSS feed, when they click on the subscribe button, they are presented with a list of RSS readers they can install. Here’s what you’d see if you were subscribing to the RSS feed for my website this way.

Next it needs to be made understood to prospective RSS subscribers that setting up a reader app is not that difficult. They doubtless have numerous apps on their device already, a RSS reader would simply be just another app they need to install. Let’s get to it.

Perhaps though styling feeds so they’re coherent in a web browser is something publishers who syndicate content to RSS should consider. Having a RSS feed that renders like a webpage — that could be bookmarked like any other website — does of course seem like it defeats the purpose of having a RSS feed.

But, if people new to RSS see a coherent looking webpage when clicking the URL of a RSS feed, they might have more incentive to find out more about RSS.

The Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, 3-5 October 2025

20 September 2025

A large blue spacecraft hovers above a futuristic cityscape of Sydney, Australia, with tall buildings and structures. The background features a large, bright yellow sphere, possibly the Moon, with a gradient sky transitioning from orange to red.

Running since 2020 I believe, this year’s Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival is on from Friday 3 October until Sunday 5 October 2025, at Event Cinemas, on George Street, in Sydney’s CBD. Eleven features will be screened, with many having their Australian premieres.

One title, The Eagle Obsession, trailer, a documentary directed by American filmmaker Jeffrey Morris, will have its international premiere at the festival.

Also known as The Eagle has Landed, the film explores travel to the Moon, both actual and imagined. William Shatner is among those appearing in the film, along with Barbara Bain and Nick Tate, who starred in 1970’s sci-fi TV series, Space 1999. Now I get the eagle reference…

The Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival Awards ceremony also takes place on the closing evening.

The spectacular banner for this year’s festival, as seen above, which is a futuristic representation of the skyline of Sydney’s CBD — spot the iconic Westfield Tower towards the left — was created by Australian filmmaker and artist Joshua Reed.

Online freelance marketplace Fiverr aspires to be an ‘AI-first’ company

20 September 2025

Fiverr plans to layoff one third of its workforce in a bid to become an AI-first enterprise, says CEO Micha Kaufman. By swapping out people for AI technologies, the company will become leaner and faster, according to Kaufman. Time will tell.

As of late last year, Fiverr employed some seven-hundred-and-sixty people, meaning about two-hundred-and-fifty jobs are on the line. Kaufman flagged the move earlier this year, when he warned AI was coming for everyone’s jobs, including his.

Australian social media age verification laws: you might need to prove your age

20 September 2025

The Australian government has issued guidelines regarding proposed age verification regulations that come into effect this December.

While social networks will be required to “detect and deactivate or remove” the accounts of members under the age of sixteen, they will not need to verify the age of every last user. This would no doubt apply to instances where someone has been a long-time user of a social media channel, or it is apparent they are over the age of sixteen.

It sounds reassuring, at least on the surface, but the devil will be in the detail. It will be down to individual platforms to decide how they go about ascertaining a member’s age, rather than there being a standard, universal, process they must adhere to. Expect to see some under-sixteens fall through cracks, while a few over-sixteens get caught in the net.

The last days of social media, or wishful thinking?

19 September 2025

James O’Sullivan, writing for Noema:

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren’t connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they’re just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

When social media is used to be social, it is useful. When deployed (in an attempt) to garner influence, especially through re-posting slop, not so much.

Despite the low quality content, and apparent lack of engagement, I don’t see social media, as we presently know it, going anywhere. Maybe the argument could be made that social media is dead, and presently exists in a zombie like state instead, dead but undead.

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Death by a thousand cuts: the AI scraper indexing one blog post at a time

16 September 2025

Like many online-publishers/bloggers, I’ve experienced significant surges of traffic caused by AI bots indexing — or whatever they do — thousands of pages at a time on my website.

I’m in two minds as to whether or not to block this activity, but it seems pointless as many crawlers disregard disallow requests. Besides, I can’t stop other entities, human or otherwise, accessing the content here, and doing what they will with it.

Once, way back in 2000, someone in New Zealand copied the entirely of the then disassociated website, republished it under the name disenfranchised or something, and called it their own work. I didn’t discover the reproduction by chance though. The responsible party emailed to tell me about it.

I wrote back (effectively) saying they should design their own website. disenfranchised, or whatever it was, vanished a few weeks later. I think they hoped I would write ceaselessly about the “rip-off” of my work, but I when I said no more, they found something else to do.

I know there are ways to make copying the contents of a website difficult, but anyone sufficiently motivated will figure out how to bypass those mechanisms.

At least someone liked what I did enough to want to copy it. I highly doubt though any crawlers gathering data for AI agents care whether what I do here is likeable or not. But what annoys me is the way the activities of this scraper are distorting my web analytics (not Google) data.

Yes, you can help yourself to the content here, just don’t mess with my web stats.

Of course, I know web analytics are by no means an exacting science, but they do highlight trends. Somehow my morning online routine would not be the same if I decided to ditch analytics. Besides my stats app holds near on twenty-years worth of data, so there is also the history aspect.

To complicate matters, the scraper uses a different IP address on every single visit, meaning I can’t simply add an ignore tag to one IP, or a range, to keep visits off the analytics app data.

Subsequently, their visits appear to originate from a different town/city, but in the same country (a populous nation in east Asia). There is also no rhyme or reason to the maybe twenty to thirty pages they visit daily. One minute it is a years old post, the next something far more recent.

As the crawler did not snatch up several thousand post in one fell swoop, it will doubtless be active for sometime to come. In the meantime I’ll make the most of thinking my website is ever so slightly more popular than usual, since there’s not much else to do.

Climate change making El Nino and La Nina harder to forecast

16 September 2025

Tom Saunders, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Thanks to climate change and a rapid warming trend in our oceans, the historical record and current analysis of the two Pacific phases has become contaminated. El Niño, the warm episode, is being falsely observed, while the cool state, La Niña, is at risk of going undetected.

The two well-known climate patterns have a significant influence on weather, either making Australian summers dryer and warmer, or wetter and not quite so warm. Of course the impact of both systems is not limited to Australia, but across the Pacific ocean, and beyond. It seemed like it was only a matter of time before climate change began to have impact on these weather patterns.

Entries for final Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship open October 2025

15 September 2025

The fellowship was created in 2011 to honour the memory of late Australian writer and biographer Hazel Rowley, who died in the same year. Past recipients of the fellowship, which supports the work of Australian biography writers, include Mary Hoban, the inaugural winner, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Matthew Lamb, and Mandy Sayer, for her book Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters.

When Rowley’s sister Della, together with Lynn Buchanan and Irene Tomaszewski, established the fellowship, they envisaged it would run for ten years, but after fifteen have decided to call time on the award. The organisers however are reportedly open to other parties taking on the fellowship, and would be prepared to assist anyone willing to do so.

It is to be hoped this will happen. Literary awards and fellowships are vital in supporting the work of Australian writers, many of whose annual earnings are well below the average salary.

Smartphone ban sees NYC students talk, play cards, use Polaroid cameras, daydream

15 September 2025

New York City recently introduced a smartphone ban in public schools. While students are not barred from owning phones, they must store their devices away during school hours.

While it’s early days, students appear to be adjusting well to life without smartphones, even if it’s only for a few hours a day. School-goers have taken to playing cards, engaging in face-to-face conversation, using Polaroid cameras, and even daydreaming, a favourite activity of mine both during and outside classes, back in my school days.

Needless to say though, some students have figured out ways to circumvent the ban, with some using burner phones they have obtained. The school hours ban seems like a good idea, and being without a smartphone for a relatively short time daily is hardly the end of the world. Some enforced non-smartphone time, a small digital detox sort of thing, for everyone, doesn’t seem a half bad idea.

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smartphones, technology, trends

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