Design Principles

For all sites (except this one, which is just my notes), we should observe the following:

  • We don’t use external services like CloudFlare (why not? and another page too). In addition to the reasons given in the link, cloudflare etc often screw up previews in social media due to their faulty bot detection. There are alternatives when (if) we get busy enough to need them.
  • The sites should load all text and image content even when scripts are blocked.
  • The sites should not leak any data to external services such as google and Facebook.
  • The compulsory cookie notices should be small and unobtrusive because we will have traffic from traffic swap and ptc sites to a certain extent and the cookie warnings should not obscure anything.
  • All images should be compressed as much as possible, eg to 50 as jpg and size reduced to around 1280 px max width/height (whichever is longest). “Optimization” plug-ins are extremely wasteful of resources and rarely make images as good as can be done manually.

SEO

We write about what we are doing in the most efficient and accurate way possible. We do not adapt what we write to suit other entities. The search engines may or may not send us users and we understand that it is not under our control at all. See “marketing“.

We will rely on our own outreach via our members and other visitors.

See also Future prospects of the web hosting business in light of Google chrushing smaller sites. We don’t want to willingly assist in our own demise! More Google scummery below.

Big tech likes to embed itself in as many websites as possible. Services like gstatic, CloudFlare and a host of others tempt us by making it “easier” to make our sites. But there is a huge downside: when things go wrong or when the provider decides it doesn’t like us, those features will simply disappear from our sites.

So we will not use them.

Google Collapse – 30000 Set To Be Be Fired As Science PROVES Their Search Algorithm Is Compromised
Google grovelling to the overlords.

Outside Resources