Neighbourgood

Neighbourgood" is a little circle of food stalls in a sports field in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, behind the Edinburgh Academicals football club. Discovered it on the site of Mexican food folks

Write about your blogs elsewhere to keep them searchable !

Write both the names and URLs of your blogs and websites, in posts on Medium or Substack, and anywhere else you find it works, in order to make them appear as search results in Google or Bing. Circulate the tip to do this. Do it because your sites themselves now may not appear in google search results, not even if their exact names or unique phrases in them are searched.

Suspiciously unaccountable quirks of “indexing” of sites, by their bots that constantly review the web for present or new sites, are happening. You can confirm so as simply, ironically, as by googling on the question of how to make it list your site. At present no search results call the problem politically motivated. Instead they explain it as that sites may have code settings that discourage searchability, yet you are not aware of this, for a long established site that always used to appear in searches, and you would need a mindnumbing education in site coding and jargon like “root directory” to find the problem, or that Google’s bots may decide a new or altered site page needs verifying of ownership. Pointless new problems that searching used to work better without, clearly.

If folks can’t find your site even by searching on key phrases or its name, that completely stops you telling the folks in Youtube comments that your site exists, or of any info your site makes public. This because, as is already well known, Youtube’s automated moderation blocks practically any post with a url in it, and even with a disguised url, it recognises “com” or “wordpress” within longer strings of characters. Quora will allow a url once but it too classes as spam and autoblocks several postings of the same url. So you need to make site names and key phrases findability by writing them in places like here.

All asking or searching tells you that Google or Bing will only receive any requests for site listing if in the process you verify your site ownership, yet why do you need to own a site to want to make it findable? and this is now by a complicated method called “DNS verification”. It involves adding a line of code they give you, to a particular place in your site’s settings. Even after you do this, they can still take undetermined months to catch up with the searchability ! You have only put your site into a queue for that ! Now, if the problem has happened to a Wordpress site, there is a money trap here. Wordpress only gives you access to the DNS settings as part of a paid subscription for your site. Though Wordpress sites are available free, if you choose a free site you can’t do this “DNS verification” thing on it, so can’t stop the big search engines ignoring the site for unaccountable reasons.

This trap is particularly striking when Wordpress has just, on Jul 14, announced to its users Bao Nguyen’s new campaigning short film Code For the People, https://codeforthepeople.com. It is a call to use “open source” public sharing of programs and code, for anyone’s use qnd ownership of their own work, to defend the open internet from growing more business controlled, and it is largely an advert for Wordpress as a leader of this cause. It gives the name “platform decay” to the notorious business phenomenon, where something on the web, a service or a writing place or a community, is initially provided free, but after it has picked up a lot of users and their online lives have grown dependent on it, it reduces or ends the free element and makes the thing paid for. It is a good point in the film, one of the ways that business breaks down the open internet. It adds up to a pull back to the old pressure on the public to trust and only believe the elite-led media-selected view of reality, shutting out everything outside the core consensuses in politics and science and religion, that used to be such an oppression of thought in the era before the web.

flag that anarchists have faith in judges

The anarchist paper Edinburgh Black Flag is shitty in attitude, and has not even got a base address that it's published from or any regular place of finding it any more frequently than annually. For it was at the Meadows Festival, annual, that I picked up one.

Its attack on Justice For Innocent Men Scotland, where it sides with dangerous dogma that defending men from injustice is anti-women, contradicts absurdly the usual healthy scepticism of the justice system in radical writings. This is the type of literature you expect to see call out court short cuts or politicised contrivance of charges. Indeed this is self-named anarchist literature which means against laws. Yet instead, without any analysis, it calls it "fearmongering" to call out easy miscarriages of justice in sexual cases, or to say there is a witch hunt, and it depends the sections 274/275 powers for judges to deny applications to present defence evidence that socially embarrasses the accuser. Completely looking glass.

At JIMS's demo at parliament 2 days before, rape/abuse survivors had banners that they are not defended by jailing the innocent !! There is no logic at all in claiming, in one line unsupported by any analysis, that a justice campaign is bound to turn into misogyny. Look at the Salmond case followed by the present SNP scandals. This is another case among so many where radicals have worshipped dogma to a point that betrays the common sense of ordinary folks' situation !

wi' Wallace untold

In seeking to post this around facebook, it was astonishing to discover the Scottish Lib Dems now have no public page, and the UK ones still after a day had no mention of Jim Wallace's passing. even as a former Deputy PM, in the first Scottish government, he shared in an ordinary grassroots experience of street campaigning in the Brexit ref 10 years ago.

His passing removes a witness to how ordinary Remain campaigners got messed around by our own side in the Brexit ref. In the polling day flyering at Edinburgh Haymarket station. I was in it, we were completely left to do it when we were in numbers, in the morning peak. Then, when numbers reduced and a couple of us stuck at it after our colleagues had finished, we got targetted by the station manager then the police, who claimed completely different activity boundaries than our own organisers had told us.

After which our organisers when told about it would not challenge the police's action, and nor would the Lib Dem from their nearby office who was flyering beside me and who favoured respectability even when pushed around instead of arguing jurisdictions to defend the election activity info our organisers had brought us there by telling us. Then Jim Wallace was there in the evening peak and was allowed unbothered to do it in a place where the morning police had not allowed us to do it.

Our (ex)organisers never answered any communication from me ever again after our polling day activity was over, and despite all the controversy around whether the ref was held fairly, I could never get anyone to take up + make use of this story about Jim Wallace.