Tag: writing

February In Books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I purchased lots of books in February but only read eight. The two best were the two that had been stuck on my unread shelves for months, if not years. I read them to clear space for other books and was pleasantly surprised.

Best

  1. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin – I have to admit I purchased that because the book cover was pretty. The book itself was written in a strange way but it stuck and I think it was the best for the month, although the competition is close. The volcanic Earth where humans can cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is quite memorable.
  2. The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie – Abercrombie delivers a lot more of the same in both good and bad sense. The Wisdom of Crowds is mind-blowing but also 750-ish pages, 250 longer than the necessary to be my top pick for the month. Savine dan Glokta doesn’t disappoint.
  3. Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher – an excellent short fantasy with a simple idea and a complex magical system about domestic violence, curses, and fairy godmothers. Although a fantastic book and a clear 5*/5, the other two were more impressive. I’ll happily read other works by the same author.

Worst

  • Extremis by Barry Eisler – I gave it 4/5, 2 weeks later I’m ready to adjust it to a solid 3. It was clear what will happen from the first page, and it happened in a slow motion.
  • Operation Star Guest by Lubomir Nikolov – I read the flying saucer book from this post but unlike the other books by the same author, which I frequently award with 5*, this came as sloppy and rushed. We are on a mission to find a flying saucer and contact an alien civilization. What do we do? Worry about food because we didn’t pack any and how to start fire. Yeah, no.

Overall, a good month for reading with a total of 8, five of which got five stars.

Jetpack App Improvements

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I just got the new update of the app and I was actually excited about the update. I can now modify the font size for reading. It only applies to the post detail screen in the reader but it’s a good start for people like me who wear glasses and struggle with tiny letters, often switching to something else after reading a page.

The post tags feature is also getting better. This is how I find new sites to follow. It’s relatively inconvenient to browse by “new” and see a mountain of posts but it works better for discovery to me than the Discover feature where all the established blogs are.

I would previously subscribe and edit tags from the website.

Cheers to the Jetpack folks 🥂

A risk to regret

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

I’ve noticed that the two most common sources of regret for my last 20-30 years of experience are:

  • Missed opportunities
  • Coulda/Woulda/Shoulda thinking when a disaster strikes and I didn’t see it coming

The risks taken that paid off – what would I regret? For example, when taking my first mortgage, it felt like a great risk. The payment was a significant portion of my salary at the time, the period was long, and the apartment we bought was not great but we couldn’t afford anything better. The interest rate was high, and the seller had some non-disclosed debt and some people wanted their money back. It ended up fine, we renovated the property over the years and resolved the issues. Turned it into a home.

When I take a risk that doesn’t pay off, I also seem to not regret it if it was a deliberate informed choice taken without influence. I stopped insuring my previous car for theft and accidents. It got stolen. The saved premiums for 3 or 4 years didn’t cover the loss of value. Did I have regrets? I didn’t. I made a choice based on the amount of time I lost each year to deal with things like paint damage and vandalism. Covering the cost myself would’ve been cheaper and quicker than going through the insurer and the police on every occurrence. The same happened with previous vehicles, none of which were stolen. It didn’t pay off last time but I felt zero regret because it felt like it was an expected, although unlikely result of my math.

Most of the time when I felt regret, I didn’t see the negative outcome coming at all even if there were obvious signs in retrospect. For example, I played basketball. A second later I was on the ground with a dislocated knee. I didn’t see it coming. Lots of coulda/woulda/shoulda followed. However, the outcome was predictable, and the risk was taken when I agreed to play with unfamiliar clumsy kids. I blogged about bias, assumptions, and intuition, a couple of times this year.

Saying “No”

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?

Over the last decade, my goal has been to not shoot an immediate “No” to things. “No” used to be my default. The things can be opportunities, they deserve to be evaluated. “No” is easy. Nothing changes, it’s conservative. “Yes”, however, is the sun breaking through the clouds. It can be hard. So, instead of saying “No”, I think about it, evaluate it, and try to make it work and to see its purpose. More often than not, it turns out that it makes sense.

Of course, this is a generalization that applies to my life. In case the thing is, “Let’s jump over the North Pole with a parachute”, still an immediate “No”. Okay, actually, can we make it work somehow? How are we getting there? How much does it cost? How do we travel to the North Pole and back? What about polar bears? Yolo.

Should I worry about Google

~ Veselin ~ 15 Comments

The fellow WordPress.com blogger, Weirdo82, complains that Google hasn’t discovered their site yet. I decided to check what my own presence on Google is with the Google Search Console (WordPress.com’s support doc).

Google knows about my site but sends no traffic, based on ~2 days of data. Google’s knowledge of my site is limited to a very small number of indexed pages. Most posts aren’t there.

Why is that and should I care about it?

  • Google ranks sites based on an ever-changing algorithm. When Google started, the top factor for ranking was inbound links – if other sites link to you. This, however, has been abused by SEO experts from day one. People would buy countless assets, use them for linking and rank themselves high with some garbage content. So, Google pushed back by adding more and more factors and so far, the battle is ongoing. They are losing it in areas with a high commercial interest but no brands. Finding a human plumber in Bulgaria with Google is no go.
  • Blogs are by nature not great at coming up with unique searchable titles. When I blog about how pretty my cup of coffee was, should I realistically expect to be ranked? Probably not.
  • Blogs that are great with titles and topics that Google wants to see are generally unreadable by humans. I see the content written for bots all the time – 3-4 pages long so that it is considered quality content by the AI overlords. It would have multiple headers in the middle, each with a list from 1 to 10 or so. When I see that, I wish I had a block button to never see it again.

Google would send me 100s of hits per day to my former blog but all of these were to 10-year-old posts I didn’t care about. I value one comment on my latest post more than a 1000 of these Google clicks. So the answer is no – for a personal blog, Google doesn’t matter. Optimizing for their ever-changing algorithm would make my site worse.

I care about Google, what do I do

Google’s strategy is to make you pay for traffic, this is what made them so big. They farm people’s desire to be found, to sell products, and to grow. So, what else?

  • Bring blogrolls back – exchange links or quotations with people. Google doesn’t mention links as SERP factors anymore but they’re likely still using them
  • Write frequently – you never know which cringe post will be ranked and will boost your site by 100-200 views per day
  • Buy a domain early and register it for a long time
  • Get some social media shares, even if it’s just you sharing your own content. It likely counts.

I would keep acting like Google doesn’t exist for the context of this blog. It would be flattering to have more traffic but I still value human interactions (likes & comments) more than random traffic to old posts. These I get primarily from the Reader, Facebook, and Twitter.