Blog Woes, Google Goes, Substack Blows

... Nobody knows the troubles I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow. 

Beautiful voice. 

But it's true. The last few months have been - the last few years have been - a bit troublesome. And the last few months have been a particular hassle for my blogging activities and for my project activities. I've been missing out on organic search results for months, possibly longer. And that's affected my ability to tackle projects, too.

So - Organic Search Results.

As some of you know I've had TEdALOG Lite II blog since 2007 - and it was a continuation of a blog I'd been operating with Notepad and HTML, then some clever program that let me compose and edit on my PC and then uploaded a new set of pages to replace the indexes and add new pages, and finally I hit on Blogger.com - which you as readers experience as Blogspot.com - and which was a Google property when I started. My reasoning was Google Blogs should work with Google Search Engine should work with Google Anything Else. Right? 

Well, sort of. For a while there wasn't any easy way to check stuff so I used Statcounter to keep my page hits statistics for me. Then there was this thing called Feedburner that let me "burn" my blog posts to an RSS feed that people could put into their newsreader software to see all my latest posts - and I still have RSS feeds for all those blogs and a list of them at Ted's News Stand if anyone wants the ultimate in post reading convenience. The Google bought Feedburner. For some reason it got harder to work with the feeds. And now it's practically useless. 

And then Google Ads came along - I put "spots" in my blogs to fit one of dozens of precisely defined formats, Google served their ads into those spots, if anyone clicked or in some cases just visited the page with the ad in it, I'd get a micropayment in my account. I was on my way to millions! 

Only... They'd collect my millions for me but would never pay them to me - because I was in Australia and they didn't pay here. And then they required me to have a business account and send them proof of identity, TFN, all the hooey. I couldn't even use the income on Google Play to pay subscriptions to apps. It would have been maddening.

Except... After several years, and adding two more blogs and installing Google Ads into them too, my balance was about $23. And Google wouldn't pay out until the end of the month, and only if the amount was $50 or more, and anway still not to Australia you uncouth little antipodean oik. Are you sensing any frustration yet? I had frustration. Oh yes. 

But I've sort of digressed. Statcounter began to limit the free features set and Google came out with Google Analytics, they allowed Aussies to cop a fair suck of the saveloy and have money paid into Aussie bank accounts, the verification process got more convenient and attainable, and so I set up Analytics on those blogs and there seemed to be a bit of friction between GA tagging stuff and Blogger blogs and it didn't always quite work for me oh and the formats of Google Ads changed a bit and - oh yeah - my balance was still under the magic $50 by a fair way and then the limit changed to $100 anyway and do you know I still haven't had a payout yet? 

Also Analytics was not playing ball all the time and the famous Google DILLIGAF attitude of no support is the best form of support meant I was trying to work out a lot of different suites of stuff to keep things going. 

Long story short - at some point I made DuckDuckGo my default search engine. Because I wasn't happy with their privacy management. Bt this was one of the frustrations.

And I also deactivated Google Ads and Google Analytics because Ads made my pages look like shit on a shingle with touches of Piet Mondrian and Pro Hart and if readers clicked away to a link they'd cop a page in between that you had to close and it was the biggest POS ever. 

Analytics kept throwing errors that I had to look up and then try to "fix" according to vague and odd snippets of BS and so one day I stopped fixing any of the errors and guess what? If you waited a few days then Analytics suddenly realised it had apparently made a cock-up because the errors went away and were never mentioned again without me having to raise a finger. WTFSM Google, WTFSM? 

Then one day recently I was actually using Google Search Engine to find a particular term on one of my posts on one of my blogs and it didn't find it. I tried DuckDuckGo and it did. Somehow in all the wholesale deactivating Google products that weren't working with the one Google product I actually found useful, the search engine stopped actually searching and serving my pages. So for FSM knows how long, I've not had a single referral from anyone doing a search any of the stuff that's in my blogs. I know DDG is becoming more popular but GSE is still the only game in town for search hits and I'm not getting them. 

Go to DDG, I have almost all my blog posts listed. Go to Bing, there they are. Go to Google, zip. It is ALL the blogs hosted on Blogspot so it's not a case of being delisted for using the "F" word too often. It's pretty obviously something I did while deactivating all the Google fruit but - geez... I have NFI what. 

But if anyone knows what else to check and rectify, I'm all ears. Contact me. Please. I'm getting too old for this shit. 

But That's Not All

I got the steak knives too... See, because I wasn't getting organic (read "served by Google or Bing but of course almost always Google and you don't have that Ted ha ha ha for reasons ha ha ha but we aren't going to tell you what they are Ted ha ha ha") hits to my pages I'm minus about 70-80% of traffic. And even though I don't serve ads now (unless I want to put them in, and please contact me if you want me to do that) I did have a few links to donate in a text footer and of course people wereren't seeing those.

So I did research and figured out how I can have one banner with multiple active zones so people could donate or subscribe to the newsletter. I felt too needy and beggy constantly adding a paragraph of "please subscribe and/or donate" messaging to the bottom of each post, I mean WTFSM? I could always do with help with the costs involved with everything I'm doing with the blogs and projects but there had to be another way and I decided a single banner image would be better. 

You know how reactive websites work? If you're on a mobile phone you get served a format that fits the screen, if you're on a tablet you get another format and if you're on a laptop or PC you get another format. 

I'm old school and use my laptop for most of what I do. (Okay I'll be honest - I'm past the point where people still have 20/20 vision and also have other issues that make reading a tiny screen difficult and swiping a little soft keyboard on-screen almost impossible.) So I preview a post, it's good - I schedule it.

I also know that most of my visitors use their mobile phone to consume the content. And just for a lark I opened a page on my trusty Samsung. 

The flippin' banner doesn't appear on mobile sites!

Blogger promises to make the site reactive if I check this box here and add this set of links there in the blog settings page and I'd done that for the lot way back when I realised some people would be reading them on their phones. But IT DOESN'T WORK. Apparently. 

So I kept the banner - which I quite liked because I created the artwork in it and scaled it and worked out how to image-map it and then use my hosted server to allow me to use one banner on multiple blogs and only have to change things in one place rather than seven. 

But I had to also make a smaller image-map banner and then insert that into the body of the blog posts so that mobile phone readers could see them and (hopefully) feel moved to donate occasionally. 

I make no bones about it - it costs me hundreds a year to keep the domain names registered, the hosted server paid up, subscriptions to the news services I read to get news and story ideas and research, and the materials for various projects I do and then make all the info available online here for free. And currently I am getting exactly nothing because no-one sees the damn pages, and then when people do, 80% of you still didn't see the banner so had no way to.

So anyhow - I made the little banner, served it from my hosted server, and - Blogger crapped itself. "You can't put an imagemap in the body! I don't know all those tags! I'm going to add a shitload more tags to try and fix it, fuck it up even more, and then spew up every time you want to edit or update this article!" 

I'm going to add here that if I add an image from yet another Google property, Google Photos, Blogger also routinely shits its pants and then the image often disappears. It's still there in the HTML but obscured and hidden by Blogger's crappy HTML handling. Why it does that sort of thing is a mystery to me but then look at Blogspot blogs anyway - they are butt-ugly and klunky af and if it weren't for the fact that Blogger is FREE I'd have found a way to transfer them all to WP and host them somewhere else. 

I had to do the same thing as I do for the header banner - kludge up an iframe and put that in the HTML and finally, that works: 

(Oh and that little inline frame works in Blogger, in WP, and in any web pages I want it to. I basically McGyvered myself a tiny CDN for my blogs... )

I mean - this has been a several-months-long battle where everything was not only rigged and stacked against me and I had and still have no way to work out what's going on. I wasn't even aware that anything had been wrong, I've lost the little bit of support I'd had, and I'm still not sure what I'll do about it but if I can get some supporters back I might just upgrade my hosted server and stick multiple WP installations on it and then figure out how I can redirect all my Blogger properties to there. But I know one thing for sure and that is that in my current state I can't manage the extra expenses. 

Late Edit: Substack

Substack, I just listened to the top cocky of the company being an arsehole in a video interview and figured they needn't be making any more income off my posts. Sorry - this was so crap when I watched it that I may have blocked it. Just got asked about it on Mastodon though so I though I should explain it.

Summary:

I know my page hits count has decreased dramatically, but I don't know by how much or when because Statcounter have been totally unhelpful in recovering a possibly hacked account a few months ago and so I've had to create a new account which doesn't have the history the old one had. I do know that I've been seeing a tiny percentage of what I was used to though - I keep saying I lost 70-80% because I'm being conservative but I can tell you the figure is far worse. Since I can't fix that on Google and can't ask everyone on the planet to use any other search engine than Google, nor afford to move all my blogs to a different platform, I'm stuck with it for now. 

If you can help, that'd be great. If you know things I can check on Google to figure out where my organic search traffic has gone to, that would help. If you can spare the price of a coffee, hit the Ko-Fi mug above or the Paypal link. If you want to know what I post, the newspaper is a link to my current list of posts, and that page also has a link to subscribe to the only-once-a-week newsletter. 

Plastic Recycling - A Tiny Lesson.

Because tiny steps... 

I watched this new Brothers Make video on layering plastic bags to make useful sheets for constructing with, and offered them one of my brainfarts for free: Laminators.

My Gift To The Recycling Community:

I've often wondered what you can do with plastic bags. So far I've slipped a piece of cardboard inside a tee shirt, laid it down and ironed it, then cut out random pieces of plastic bags (and a few strands of PLA filament for the sake of the experiment) laid them on the tee, then put my silicon sheet on top and thoroughly ironed it at as hot a setting as I could get my old iron to go. The patterns on the plastic bags transfer easily onto the shirt but it's a bit thicker and more inflexible than screen printing, and as to the PLA - don't do that unless you want to build stiffeners into the material to make it drape funny and stick out awkwardly... 

But the real test I want to do (and which is why that video started me thinking again) is that I've wanted to try pressing plastic bags onto each other and onto fabric and what-have-you by making a sandwich with baking paper, plastic or some base fabric, then a few more layers of plastic bags and then another baking paper layer - and feeding that through a common or garden variety office laminator. And we have a small A4 laminator but I'm not game to use it in case the thicker materials break the roller mechanism. Because we use that laminator a fair bit. So I'm kind of stuck until things change.

At A4 width it's also not much use for teeshirts or wider projects, although it's well to point out that with a bit of organisation and laying out of materials you could probably make a metres-long strip, the roller moves quite slowly. But if I could afford to waste money on an A3 laminator that I can also pull apart and adjust the thickness on, I'd definitely have a go at that.

Disclaimer: I do not recommend pulling apart a mains-powered machine unless you're a qualified electrical trades-or-repair-person. It's simply not worth the risk. I'll just point out that I was an electronics hobbyist since I was 11, worked casual at a TV / electronics repair shop by age 13, and then with electrical tradespeople by age 15. I don't recall the number of times I've "arced" myself up and luckily lived to learn to be better next time. And I haven't zapped myself in 30+ years now, and keep up to date with all that electrical technology. (I was going to say I kept - "current" - with it but see what a bad pun I (almost) spared you there?)

But definitely - if you want to experiment with laminating, give it a go - use the Mastodon chat (under the banner above) and let me know how it went. If you want to help me buy a reasonable laminating machine that I can use, there's a link in the banner to donate, too. Or just subscribe to my once-a-week-on-a-Friday newsletter, link also in the banner.

Now To My Tiny Project:

I may not be able to do plastic/fabric or plastic/plastic composites yet, but I do have a cheap toasted sandwich maker press thingie . . .

I use that sandwich press to squish old bottle caps into sheets (a task that takes about 15-20 minutes, use a silicon BBQ sheet, lay plastic pieces on, another silicon sheet, close the lid, turn on, wait 20 minutes, turn off, wait 20 - 40 minutes more for it to cool entirely, Big Reveal, all together - wow...) and I don't always wash or clean the caps because it's difficult without a dedicated wash machine, but I still get good enough results. 

And yes it has my DNA embedded on  it in the form

of hair, but I'll have to sand it smooth anyway, so...

That above took about 40-45 white bottle caps and two black ones for contrast, did this a few hours ago. I let the white/black layer bond under heat for 15 minutes and let it cool for 45, then added the top layer of colours. These bottle caps were split around the rim and flattened, a few of the retaining rings and a bathroom curtain ring in non-white colours were sprinkled on, and now I have a wobbly placard thingy.

You really should wash your plastics and dry them thoroughly but I didn't, and you can see the dust and stuff. This is also only a 2mm-3mm thick sheet, quite strong though because I used all PP plastic for this. You can tell on larger pieces of PP plastic that have enough surface area that they can have a stamp on the because its recycling number is 5 (A "5" inside the triangle, and if you're lucky, "PP" directly under the triangle.) but bottle caps often don't get a stamp, although they really should have them. 

I knew because most bottle caps are made from either PP (hard and crunchy) or HDPE (recycle number 2 and with HDPE under the triangle; and it's soft and bendable) with very little variation. Also made from PP: - plant nursery pots usually are, and many hard plastic tubs that some food pastes etc come packaged in, quite often the tops of aerosol spray cans and spray paint cans, and some hair and beauty product containers. 

Here's a table of plastic recycle symbols to help you figure out what plastics you may have.

Disclaimer: I've seen some newer lids that have a thin layer of some rubbery plastic inside them to form a seal, don't use those as two plastics rarely melt together very well. Also, I'm only 90% sure that all lids are PP or HDPE, so you may need to check yours. HDPE and PP can be processed in small quantities like I do without air filtration but other plastics can give off toxic fumes and need air hoods and filters and preferably also wearing a respirator or organics filtering mask.

I'll be sanding this flat on both sides and then finding a use for it. At this stage a front panel for an electronics project is my best guess, but a more plainly-coloured background with contrasting numbers glued / fused / 3D printed on make for a novel and interesting house number, or if you frame a thin sheet it would make a nice abstract art piece and be quite unique. Also with a fretsaw you could cut out some nice keytags, or use a bit more heat to press it into a plant-pot-shaped mold and make small unique plant pots. 

You can make these kinds of projects with a sandwich press that's got flat surfaces top and bottom, or in a baking tray lined with a teflon sheet in one of those table-top ovens, which would also let you drape your finished sheets over to make those plant pots. 

But whatever you use for processing plastic - don't ever use them for food again as there are so many compounds in plastic that'll give you a very regrettable time just from inhaling them let alone ingesting them in your cookies or toasties.

Personally I'd like to one day make a mini-sheetpress similar to the Precious Plastic sheetpress but that takes wherewithal and wherewithal I have not got - because no-one wants to donate. I'd like to make a large sheetpress and cooling press just like the PreshPlast machines, and a plastic shredder and injection machine just like theirs too - but you know, not many people will sponsor a AUD$150k set of machines and the space to operate them so that a bunch of community organisations can recycle plastics and make some money for their organisations either - and yet that's what it'll take to stop the billions of tons of plastic going to landfill and the air and the water and the animals and fishes and turtles and birds and plants and insects and us. Hundreds and hundreds of small community organisations setting up to recycle plastics and textiles and metals and so forth. 

So I'll keep plugging away making tiny projects and publicising them and sometimes even selling one instead of giving it away, but I'll never achieve any of those bigger things unless YOU start sharing these posts, and discussing stuff like this, emailing your politicians to make more grants to be made available for small non-profit / charity recycling projects - the big corporations have not only caused this global disaster, they've also spectacularly failed to take responsibility or action which a bunch of people working from home have proved are not only possible but actually simple and effective. You'd think they didn't give a shit wouldn't you? And you'd be right. They don't. As long as the profits roll in. 

I think that's a thing we should all think about and then act on...