Recent content on John Mueller's randoms
Let’s connect a static site generator, like Hugo, to IndexNow’s search engine submissions, using automatic Github Actions whenever you make changes. Will this change how your site appears in all search engines? Will your site’s SEO suddenly explode? No. Also No. I’m just here because I wanted to see if it was possible. And tl;dr: yes, you can. (Well, technically it…
tl;dr: you can embed a robots.txt file into an audio file, and it can be both a valid robots.txt and a valid audio file. The robots.txt standard has a nifty feature: it will ignore anything that it doesn’t understand. Random text, ASCII art , and even other data can be added without making the robots.txt file invalid. You could do something simple. Roses are red Violets are blue user-agent:…
Sometimes you might find, that after a CMS migration, some things are missing. Obviously nobody would do such a thing on purpose, right? But it can happen. Suddenly, instead of something complete, you’re left with just guitars . Let’s do a quick & dirty hack to check for important, lost URLs. curl…
WLED 0.15.x needs a bit more app space than some ancient WLED installation. Usually updating the partition table requires a local USB connection. This is an app that you can install via OTA which expands app partitions to 1536KB. The general approach to creating partitions on an ESP32 device involve connecting it via USB and flashing it with the IDF library (using gen_esp32part.py to create a…
Midjourney is fun, but the Discord-based interface is somewhat annoying, if you want to make a lot of images. To get all the images you generate, you have to upscale all 2x2 previews, and save them manually. It can get pretty tiring, so instead of making better images, I spent a bit of time to automate the download and import process. With this code, a Discord bot will monitor your server, watch…
While it’s cool to host your own Mastodon server, it’s not really efficient . A simple thing you can do, however, is to make it easier for others to discover your presence, if they already know your website. Try it out – search for “johnmu@johnmu.com” in your Mastodon instance. Also, click “follow” for SEO tips & other bad takes. Why is hosting your own…
Now that Mastodon is more of a thing, I thought I’d set up a static embed of Mastadon posts within Hugo, similar to what I did for Twitter posts . With the static embedding, I wanted to remove all requirements for JavaScript, and remove all third-party requests on behalf of the users here. In short, this speeds things up, and saves you from worrying about cookies & tracking, or needing to…
It’s been a while since I initially looked into what it takes to make an optimal wifi connection with an Espressif ESP8266 / ESP-01 ( old post ). Using the code from the old post didn’t work … anymore? What the heck. So much for rolling out another kind of battery-powered ESP8266 device. Time to dig into what goes on with the wifi connection timing. The code is on Github . Most…
I wanted to do a short post on how to do something with the Search Console API with R. Backing up a bit, I thought I’d include a short summary of how to get started with R, and as you do, I’m now writing a separate post on how to do that. No, I won’t back up more and explain computers or how to connect your printer. Setup For today’s excursion we’ll use the…
I don’t know many (or any) people who think of characters and words in binary, but that might just be a limitation on my end. If you prefer binary, maybe this is something for you. If you just want to geek out, you’re welcome to stay here too. Using a 2-button macro-keyboard and some Arduino code, you can tap in binary and have the keyboard enter ASCII characters. View on YouTube
I have -too many, err- some extra ESP32 boards so I thought it would be fun to make a small weather display for the SEO weather. The obvious choice is to use MozCast . This is Moz’s unique interpretation of how Google’s search results change. This doesn’t reflect what Google does in its algorithms, but it’s a number for the weather, so why not. It’s hopefully obvious…
Who doesn’t love a good button? Click click click, so satisfying. In the search for SMD switches / buttons, I thought I’d just buy some of “all” and try them out. I realize there are many more, this is just what I found browsing Aliexpress. This doc is mostly for me, but I’ll probably spent way too much time on it, so I might as well put it up. Criteria (more or less)
Zwift recently released a new set of routes on a made-up island called Makuri . Different from some of the other maps, this one has a ton of cross-roads, and there’s a lot to see. It’s pretty. So, of course, instead of cycling there, I thought it would be a fun exercise to find the shortest path that lets you see everything at least once. Without further ado, here’s the optimal…
Making a hardware button that connects to wifi and sends a request off to a server is possible using Arduino. Light switches are (almost) immediate – but simple wifi switches easily take 8-10 seconds to connect & switch. How do you get that time down? Here’s my approach. Measure end-to-end - what’s the default time? Is it really that bad, or just sometimes bad? Split into parts…