#We Rank Webpage

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the world's leading breach expert got phished

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

If you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker. Also, if you think you can't get phished, you're the sucker.

I've been successfully scammed six times in my life. Each time, the scam relied on the confluence of several factors that yielded a fleeting moment of vulnerability that some scammer was able to exploit by being in the right place at the right time. I had to be lucky always, they only had to be lucky once.

The first time I got scammed was in 2008, on my first trip to India. As I walked toward the Mumbai airport taxi queue at 2AM, I was approached by two uniformed airport security guards who told me that the taxi rank had been moved in the wake of a recent terrorist bombing in Islamabad, which had resulted in all the regional airports going on high alert. The bombing was real, the airport high alerts were real. The security guards – not real. They were scammers, working with a fake cab that charged me $200 for a $20 taxi ride.

I got scammed again this way in Shanghai, at the Pudong taxi-rank. I was with my wife, daughter and parents and we split into two cabs and the drivers colluded to turn off their meters and charge us extremely high cash fares, dropping us across the street from our hotel so we couldn't enlist the doorman to interpret. Again, it was very late at night, things were confusing, and we'd had to wait for more than an hour for the cab, so we were exhausted and sweaty and divided into two groups so we couldn't coordinate strategy.

Then there was the time I got successfully phished by a Twitter account takeover worm:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

That was also a miracle of timing – for the scammers. I got hit on a day when I was running late, when I'd just reinstalled my phone's OS and was being prompted for my passwords all over again, when I had just done a bunch of major publishing and was getting a lot of messages about my new articles. When a friend got infected by a worm that took over his account and messaged me, "Is this you?" with a link that took me to a webpage that asked me to log back into Twitter, I re-entered my password. If I'd been five minutes later in getting to that DM, I would have seen three more identical messages from other infected friends and twigged to the scam. But I just happened to look at my phone in the two-minute window when the scam wasn't self-evident, and I just happened to be distracted and flustered about running late, and I just happened to have had some life circumstances that made the generic phishing lure seem plausible.

In 2023, I got scammed by a fake restaurant. I was on the couch with a friend from out of town who'd come by to watch a movie. We were chatting and decided to order from our local Thai restaurant. The top result on Google was a paid ad (marked out with the word "ad" in 8-point, grey-on-white type) that had a plausible domain name, which led to a replica of my local place's menu, only with the prices set 15% higher. I didn't even notice – not until the restaurant called me to say that they'd had a flood of orders from these scammers, who charged their customers' credit cards 15% over the odds, then placed an order for delivery using their own credit card numbers. I ended up contesting the charge with Amex, getting the scammers' Wix and credit card accounts canceled, and shaming Google into blocking their ads:

https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/cory-doctorow-duped-by-fake-thai-restaurant-scam/

Then there's the guy who used leaked data from my credit union to impersonate their fraud department, calling me up and social-engineering me out of the last seven digits of my card number (not the last four, as is common – most banks use the same nine-digit prefix, so the final seven digits are all you need to derive the whole card number). The scammer called right after I used two dodgy ATMs in New Orleans, during my last hour in town when I was rushing around to get my most favorite sandwich in the world before leaving. It was the day that a Boeing 737 Max lost its door-plug so the airport was a zoo and we barely made the flight, so I lost the hour I'd planned to use to call the bank's fraud department back. Again: if, if, if. If he'd called an hour earlier – or later. If there hadn't been a giant aviation disaster. If I hadn't been traveling. The scammer had to get lucky once, I had to be lucky every time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

I got scammed again last Christmas week. I was in NYC with my wife and daughter and I'd gotten great tickets to see The Outsiders on Broadway. It was my kid's first musical and to her surprise, she loved it. In the cab back to the friend's place we were staying at, we talked about what other musicals she might want to see. She loves South Park, and I'd seen banners advertising The Book of Mormon (which was created by the same people) in LA. So I looked up "book of mormon tickets los angeles" on my phone in the cab and found the production's website and ordered the tickets, working quickly in the cab because it was one of those websites that has a countdown timer so you have to finish your transaction in five minutes.

It wasn't the real Book of Mormon website. It was a scam website, reselling Book of Mormon tickets at a 200%+ markup. That fact was noted in infinitesimal writing on the main screen, which I missed in the crowded taxi backseat while I raced the countdown timer. I figured it out about 20 seconds after the transaction cleared, and immediately emailed the vendor to cancel it. All I got was a series of smug "all transactions final" emails from outsource customer service reps (in the end, I was able to get my credit card issuer to reverse the transaction, but it took months). But yeah, I got scammed by a sleazy company called "Bigstub." Fuck those guys.

Every time I got scammed, the con that got me was nearly identical to a con that I'd avoided on numerous occasions. The fact that I'm actually pretty good at spotting this kind of hustle, 99.9% of the time, didn't mean I was immune it it. It just meant that I was vulnerable under very special circumstances, and those very special circumstances do crop up from time to time.

This is the most important lesson of scams: that no matter how well-attuned you are to cons, you can still be conned. The belief that you are immune to a con actually makes you a mark. It's for that reason that I recount the tales of how I got scammed – to help other people understand that being sophisticated, alert and even paranoid is no guarantee that you will be safe.

I'm not the only person for whom a detailed knowledge of scams created immunity from being scammed. Troy Hunt is the proprietor of HaveIBeenPwned.com, the internet's most comprehensive and reliable breach notification site. Hunt pretty much invented the practice of tracking breaches, and he is steeped – saturated – in up-to-the-minute, nitty-gritty details of how internet scams work.

Guess who got phished?

https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mailchimp-mailing-list/

Hunt had just gotten off a long-haul flight. He was jetlagged. He got a well-constructed, plausible counterfeit email from Mailchimp telling him that his mailing-list – which he absolutely relies upon – had been frozen after a spam complaint, and advising him to click on a link to contest the suspension. He was taken to a fake login screen that his password manager didn't autopopulate, so he manually pasted the password in (Mailchimp doesn't have 2FA). It was only when the login session hung that he realized he'd been scammed – and by then, it was too late. Within minutes, his mailing list had been exported by the scammers.

In his postmortem of the scam, Hunt identifies the overlapping factors that made him vulnerable. He was jetlagged. The mailing list was important. Bogus spam complaints are common. Big corporate sites like Mailchimp often redirect their logins through different domains, which causes password manager autofill to fail. Hunt had experienced near-identical phishing attempts before and spotted them, but this one just happened to land at the very moment that he was vulnerable. Plus – as with my credit union scam – it seems likely that Mailchimp itself had been breached (or has an insider threat), which allowed the scammers to pad out the scam with plausible details that made it seem legit.

Hunt's forensics on the scam are very interesting. Of especial note is the fact that Mailchimp had retained the email addresses of thousands of former subscribers who had already unsubscribed, meaning that their data was exposed as well. It's not clear why Mailchimp would do this, but I will note that the company is extraordinarily spammer-friendly and goes to great lengths to make it easy for spammers to add you to their lists, and impossible to get off of all those lists;

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

Getting scammed doesn't mean you were stupid, or careless. Frequently, it just means you were distracted, upset, or distraught. We're living through a moment of total, all-consuming chaos, and the scammers are sharpening their blades – not least because the people running the show are unabashed grifters who openly boast that when they get one over on you, "that makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Buyer beware – it's ugly out there, and it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecomms.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[p0orbaby]

Request😍: y/n and alessia or leah (you decide! find your tumblr side and aaalll the stories of them. It leads to jealous alessia/leah bc of y/n being with other girls (like getting jealous when your partner cheats in your dream). Reader has to handle the situation and in the end manages to make less/leah focus on all the fluffy/spicy stuff there is about them. If you want to make it smutty (what we all love hehe): they eventually get inspired by tumblr and choose another story (you can decide which of all the good alessia/leah x reader smut on here) to reenact. Thank you!!! (If you dont want to write this feel free to repost for another writer, also you can switch the roles who is jealous, i dont care:)

i amended this a little, pls don’t hate me

it would be harsh to call this a crack fic but i honestly giggled the whole time writing it 🤭

-

You find Alessia on the sofa, her face illuminated by the blue glow of her phone screen. At first, you think she’s watching one of those oddly specific TikToks she loves—something about cats playing table tennis or an American teenager ranking their favourite crisps. But then you notice the furrow in her brow, the way her teeth tug at her bottom lip. Her expression is equal parts confusion, disbelief, and mild offence.

“Everything alright?” you ask, setting your keys on the counter.

She doesn’t answer immediately, which is a bad sign. Alessia always greets you the moment you walk through the door, even if it’s just to ask what you’ve brought for dinner. Instead, she tilts the phone slightly so you can see the screen.

“Do you know about this?” she asks, voice clipped.

You lean over, squinting at the screen. The webpage is clunky, its layout straight out of 2012, and the title reads something absurd like ‘Sunlit Smiles and Shadowed Hearts’. Your name is prominently featured in the summary, alongside a few other recognisable ones.

“It’s fanfiction,” she says, answering the question you haven’t asked yet. “About you”

You blink. “About me?”

“And other people,” she adds, her tone sharp now, like the edge of a too-clean knife.

The penny drops. “Wait—what?”

She sits up straighter, turning the phone to face you fully. “Look. This one has you with… God, Tooney. And this one—oh, this is just brilliant—you’re married to Ona. Married! Like we’re just some passing fling”

You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing, which, given her expression, would be a tactical error. Alessia doesn’t do jealousy often, but when she does, it’s like an overdramatic romcom villain plotting their revenge.

“Well,” you say carefully, “at least they’ve got good taste?”

“Good taste?” she repeats, incredulous. “One of these has you sneaking off with Mary behind my back during a post-match interview!”

“Creative, though,” you offer.

She glares at you, tossing the phone onto the cushion beside her. “This isn’t funny”

“It’s a little funny,” you say, sitting down next to her.

“It’s not,” she insists, crossing her arms. “Do you know how many of these there are? And how many don’t have me in them at all? Like I’m just some side character in your life?”

You try to suppress the grin tugging at your lips, but it’s no use. “Less, you do realise this is all made up, right? None of it’s real”

She huffs, her cheeks pink now. “I know that. But still. It’s insulting”

You reach for her hand, gently uncrossing her arms. “Alright, let’s look at it this way. I’m obviously very popular. Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Not when you’re popular with everyone except me”

“Oh, come on,” you tease, squeezing her hand. “I’m pretty sure there’s stuff about us too. The fluffy, romantic, borderline inappropriate kind”

Alessia hesitates, her gaze flicking to the phone. “You think so?”

“I know so,” you say confidently. “Because we’re the superior couple. Clearly”

That earns a small smile, though she tries to hide it. “You’re an idiot”

“And yet, here I am, fully committed to proving my devotion,” you say, reaching for her phone. You type in a search, scrolling through pages until you find what you’re looking for. “See? Right here. This one’s about us”

She leans over, peering at the screen. Her eyes scan the words, and slowly, her frown starts to fade.

“This is… cute,” she admits reluctantly.

“Exactly,” you say, draping an arm around her shoulders. “So, no more being jealous of fictional versions of me, okay? They don’t get to go home with you. I do”

She turns to look at you, her expression softening further. “Fine. But I’m still not over the Mary thing”

You laugh, pressing a kiss to her temple. “Noted. I’ll make it up to you”

“You better,” she mumbles, but there’s no real bite to her words anymore.

It’s only later, as you’re cooking dinner together, that you catch her sneaking glances at her phone again, her lips twitching with the beginnings of a smile. If she’s reading more of those stories, you don’t mention it. Some battles are better left unpicked.

[brucewaynehater101]

Okay so I saw you say space emperor Tim gives new planets PowerPoints so …

For his first world the power points are a nightmare. Tim, once a normal school kid, has unfortunately gotten used to Bat slide shows which are 900 pages and contain every piece of information known to man. YJ have become slightly desensitized to the pwr points (they just space out whenever Tim starts) so they don’t think to call him out on his insanity before

Tim sends every citizen a power point explaining ALL of their rights and new social services as his subjects explained in detail (it’s like 500-1000 pages)

In addition to another PowerPoints for any government employees or people with political power explaining what is and is not acceptable for them to do (a healthy bonus 1000-2000 pages)

People are impressed by his enthusiasm, but a little terrified of him because of this

Tim did not mean to terrify his populace with a power point…

He must DO better next time to ensure populous is not terrified…

How do you make a PowerPoint that is not terrifying to the average person but still conveys the necessary information…

Tim doesn’t really know anymore

Cassie is the only one who has any idea what a “normal person” power point looks like (Kon never went to school/only knows scientific “we’re making a clone” power points from imprinted memories + Bart is beyond PowerPoints in the future)

So Cassie and Tim team up to hella compress Tim’s power points into short but meaningful summaries (Bart and Kon still try to help as test audience)

With each planet they add Tim gets better and better at normal people PowerPoints

Repeat leave planet accidentally becomes experiment ground for improving power points (it’s the same info but Tim actually gets a chance to do better at the presentation)

Tim’s PowerPoint eventually become beautiful near works of art that perfectly summarize what people need to know (and tell them where they can get more info if they want it cause Tim still wants desperately to give them every piece of information they could possibly need)

Maybe a planet with a people that respect the art of presenting information/educating others join Tim’s empire because they see his work and just wanna get a great power point presentation too :)

This also accidentally sets him up to be the best ceo/high ranking employee from the Wayne family that WE has ever seen cause for the first time in 40 years someone cares about the wellbeing of the company and can make a normal length presentation (Bruce could never)

With his new PowerPoint skills I also think Tim sends out PowerPoints for anything official news worthy that a planet might have to deal with. It ranges from built a building! to new social service! to new planet yeah! to we’re going to war and everything is going to be fine don’t worry about it! and so many other official statements as PowerPoint presentations oh my

So yeah, PowerPoints :)

Tim Drake, the PowerPoint King.

After he masters the PowerPoints, I'd love to sit through one of them. The "So you've decided to join the Timpire" one would be so intriguing to hear about.

What policies are in place? Rules, regulations, restrictions? What do people need to fill out, add to their planet, get rid of, etc.?

He'd also need to set up webpages with all the information (I hc internet is free everywhere in the timpire... though, idk how the internet and being in space work).

[soon-palestine]

An interactive evacuation zone map, touted by the Israeli military as an innovation in humanitarian process, was revealed to rely on a subset of an internal Israeli military intelligence database. The US-based software developer who revealed the careless error has determined -> that the database was in use since at least 2022 and was updated through December of 2023.

On Tuesday, July 9th, we discovered an interactive version of the evacuation map while examining a page on the IDF's Arabic-language website accessible via a QR code -> published on an evacuation order leaflet.

The map is divided into "population blocks" an IDF term to refer to the 620 polygons used to divide Gaza into sectors that a user can zoom into and out of.

However each request to the site pulls not only the polygon -> boundaries but the demographic information assigned to that sector, including which families - and how many. members - live there.

𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐄𝐯𝐚𝐜𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐩𝐬:

Evacuation maps have played a central role -> in determining which sectors of Gaza were deemed "safe", but repeated instances of Israeli bombing in "safe" sectors has prompted international bodies to state "nowhere in Gaza is safe"

To determine how these sectors have been affected over time, assess the presence of vital -> civilian infrastructure, and gauge the potential impact on the population following the military's evacuation calls to Gaza City residents, the latest of which was two days ago, our team created a map tied to a database using software known as a "geographic information system” -> With the help of volunteer GIS developers, our map of Gaza included individual layers for hospitals, educational facilities, roads, and municipal boundaries.

This endeavor took an unexpected turn earlier this week when we started to work on -> the layer of "evacuation population blocks"

using a map shared to the Israeli military's Arabic site. Unlike static images, these maps responded interactively to zooming and panning. A software developer suggested that dynamic interaction was possible because the coordinates -> of various "population blocks" were delivered to the browser with each request, potentially retrieving the coordinates of the "population blocks" in real time and overlaying them on the map we were building.

The software developer delved into the webpage's source code -> —a practice involving the inspection of code delivered to every visitor's browser by the website. The source code of every website is publicly available and delivered to visitors on every page request. It functions "under the hood" of the website and can be viewed without -> any specialized tools or form of hacking.

𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐔𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚

Upon examination, the data retrieved by the dynamic evacuation map included much more than just geographical coordinates. The source code contained a table from an unknown GIS -> database with numerous additional fields labelled in Hebrew.

These fields included population estimates for each block, details of the two largest clans in each block (referred to as “CLAN”), rankings based on unknown criteria -> and timestamps indicating when records were last updated.

Some data terms, such as "manpower_e," were ambiguous for us to interpret, possibly referring to either the number of fighters or the necessary personnel to maintain the area -> Using this information we determined that Block 234, Abu Madin was last updated on 27 April 2022. This suggests that Israel's effort to divide Gaza into 620 "population blocks" began one and a half years before the current Israeli offensive -> Additional modification dates indicate that the military updated data in this field regularly throughout October and November, before formally publishing it on the arabic Israeli military webpage on December 1, 2023.

It appears that the IDF has accidentally published -> a subset of their internal intelligence

GIS database in an effort to impress the world with a novel, humanitarian evacuation aid. It is easier to retrieve a database in its entirety than to write a properly selective query. Such mistakes are common among programmers that lack -> experience, security training, or are simply unwilling or unable to do meet standard data security requirements for a project.

𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐝𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐬 -> In January, Israeli security chiefs proposed a plan for "the day after" where Palestinian clans in the Gaza Strip would temporarily administer the coastal enclave. In this concept, each clan would handle humanitarian aid and resources for their local regions. Israeli assessments of the proposal suggested such a plan would fail due to "lack of will" and retaliation by Hamas against clans willing to collaborate with the army. The plan has since been modified to include Hamas-free “bubbles,” (as reported by the Financial Times) -> where local Palestinians would gradually take over aid distribution responsibilities.

As this plan is to be initially implemented in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia. Al-Atatrah Area and Beit Hanoun, we have analyzed the information in the database assigned to those three areas -> Israeli army classified the Al-Atatrah area as region 1741, although there are only 620 'blocks' on the map. The registered population was listed as 949, last updated by the IDF on October 9th. We assume this represents an estimate by the IDF of current residents as of Oct 9th. Residents of Al-Atatrah were among the first to evacuate following the initial bombardment on October 7th and 8th and were not given a formal notification to evacuate. The Israeli military noted that the Abo Halima family comprised 54% of the block’s population -> In area west of the town Beit Hanoun, Israel had desginated the Almasri clan as the largest in the sector, consisting 18% of the block's population. Second largest was the Hamad family, with11% of the block's population. This area were also associated with rankings, however -> without the criteria used to determine the ranking, these numbers are difficult to interpret.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞�� 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥?

Although some of the data were inadvertently truncated during publication, posing challenges for comprehensive -> interpretation, this database provides a valuable window into the Israeli military's perspective on Gaza.

For one, it prompts questions into why the military had already partitioned Gaza into 620 population blocks a year an a half before October 7th -> This suggests an early inclination to implement a governance policy where clans would assume authoritative roles, as well as detailed population surveillance. Tracking dense populations in the chaos of urban warfare is a difficult task -> It may be that the QR code on the evacuation map actively collects the locations of people who scan it, allowing the IDF to collect real-time data on Palestinians in Gaza as they attempt to find safety.

END

[celticcrossanon]

BRF Reading - 21st of March, 2024

This is speculation only

Cards drawn on the 21st of March, 2024

Question: Why is Harry still on the royal website?

Interpretation: Because The King refuses to have him removed.

Card One: The Emperor in reverse

The Emperor represents The King, so this card is talking about King Charles.

In the reverse, the Emperor energy is stubborn, rigid, and domineering. It can also represent a tyrant. I don't think that King Charles is a tyrant, but I do feel that he is being stubborn and insisting that Harry stay on the royal website 'because he is my son'. The energy of this card is very rigid. It is the energy of someone who is insisting on having things his own way no matter what the cost.

The Emperor in reverse is the Emperor person acting out of their shadow side or their worst side. In this case, it is King Charles who is acting out of his worst side. The energy here is of someone who is very spoilt, who is used to getting their own way in everything, and they are tired and cranky and unwilling to consider doing anything that is not exactly what they want. If they were a two year old I would be expecting tantrums and early bedtime, but this is a 75 year old man we are talking about.

This is the first time I have seen a similarity between the King's energy and Harry's energy. The energy this card is giving me is a more refined version of Harry's usual petulant, sulky, spoilt brat energy.

Card Two: The Sun

The Sun is a card of optimism, warmth, positivity, success, believing that everything will be all right in the end. It can also be a card for children.

This card is giving me golden child energy. There is no other way to describe it. The energy is of a child who can do no wrong, who will always be protected, pampered and adored, and who will always be cosseted by his parent. This tells me that Harry is the golden child of King Charles and that the King will do whatever he can to cosset, protect, and smooth the path of his favourite child. This reflects the picture on the card, of the god Apollo, who was the favourite son of the chief god Zeus.

In answer the the question, this card tells me that Harry is the favourite child of King Charles and The King is not removing his favourite son from the royal website. I sense that it was a struggle to get Harry in the last position on the page, as The King wanted him right under Prince William, and only other people insisting on having all the working royals first, and all the royals on the page in rank order, prevented this from happening. So having Harry on the page was a compromise to prevent him being listed under Prince William (I could be wrong about this, but there is definitely an energy of being elevated above all others coming from this card).

Card Three: The Wheel of Fortune in Reverse

This card is about your current position and whether you are rising or falling in esteem. In the reverse, it says that your fortunes are falling, you are declining in esteem, you have no control or are clinging to control, and you face unwelcome changes.

Harry has obviously fallen in public esteem, so this card applies to him - he is not favoured by the public and as per his actions there is no reason to favour him by having him on the website or any higher on the website.

The energy of this cardis of someone facing unwelcome changes. I think this refers to King Charles, who is not happy about Harry being last on the website page. I think he may have had to compromise to keep Harry on the page at all, as per the energy of the previous card.

The reversal of fortune energy of this card could be an argument that was used to have The King agree to have Harry in the bottom position on the webpage - that to have him any higher would outrage the general public, who (quite rightly) have no good opinion of Harry after everything he has done, and the BRF can not afford the hit to their reputation if this happens.

Card Four: The King of Cups in Reverse

The King of Cups is a card that represents Scorpio, and in this reading it represents King Charles, a sun sign Scorpio. It represents King Charles as a person, not in his role as King.

The card being in reverse tells me that King Charles is very unhappy about the changes to the royal website with respect to Harry, not just as a king (the Emperor card in reverse) but also as a person. There are waves of unhappiness coming off this card. King Charles did not get his own way with respect to Harry and he is very upset about it.

The card in reverse also tells me that King Charles as-a-person is operating out of his shadow side in this matter. With the King of Cups reversed that means someone who is selfish, emotionally manipulative, over-emotional, making decisions with the heart and not the head, moody, volatile emotionally, and seeking vengeance on all who he sees as wronging him.

I expect repercussions from the decision to put Harry at the bottom of the page (and not return him to under Prince William). The King will be looking for someone to blame and possibly to punish that person in some way for not allowing his darling boy to be in his rightful place as a prince and son of the king.

Underlying Energy: The Five of Swords.

This is my card for duty. As a general card, it is a card of not being able to win for losing, of arguments, aggression, bullying, conflict, hostility, and stress.

This card tells me two things: Firstly, that an argument about duty was used to keep Harry on the website (maybe something like "He is my son and it is my duty as a father to have my sons on the website"). Secondly, that the decision to keep Harry on the website caused a lot of arguments, that The King got his way by 'pulling rank' or something similar, and that this has caused a lot of hostility from his advisors and perhaps other members of the BRF. The King has won the battle to keep Harry on the website, albeit in a compromise position (possibly), but his behaviour during the conflicts that arose has alienated some of his supporters and advisors. The end result was not worth the hurt feelings involved, and everyone can see this except The King.

Conclusion:

Harry has been kept on the website because The King wants him there. The King is not concerned about how this will appear to the general public, he wants his favourite son on the royal website and that is what happened. The King's insistence on this and his method of winning the arguments over this (riding roughshod over everyone) has caused a lot of hostility among his advisors and supporters.

There are suggestions in the energy that Harry's position on the page is a compromise and the King wanted him under Prince William. If this is the case, then The King is very hurt because he didn't get what he wanted, he is brooding over it (?sulking?), and he is looking for someone to blame and punish in some way.

In this reading The King was acting out of his shadow energy, his worse side, both in his role as King and as a person/parent. He came across as overly emotional, emotionally manipulative, almost a bully (pulling rank to get his own way), stubborn, rigid, and domineering. His energy was of a spoilt brat sulking because they didn't get exactly what they wanted, and very close to throwing a tantrum to get it. It is the first time I have seen the same energy in The King and his son Harry.

[petervintonjr]

"One of the five bravest American soldiers in the war."      --Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

This Decoration Day/Memorial Day we remember the heroic career of U.S. Army Sergeant (William) Henry Johnson. This particular trading card will be the last (for now) of my series-within-a-series of "mysteriously" absent biographies that aren't showing up on .mil and .gov websites anymore.

Born in 1892 North Carolina, Henry Johnson moved to Albany, New York and worked a number of jobs --including as a redcap porter at Union Station -- before enlisting in 1917. Signing on with the famed all-Black 369th Infantry ("Harlem Hellfighters," previously covered in Lessons #36, #60, #143, and #151 of this series); Johnson saw front-line action almost immediately in 1918.

At the time the 369th was brigaded with a French army colonial unit in the Champagne region, along the notorious western front. On the night of May 15, 1918, Pvt. Johnson and fellow Pvt. Needham Roberts were attacked in the Argonne forest by a German raiding party of approximately 12 soldiers. Roberts was wounded and very nearly made prisoner, but Johnson fought back in close-quartered combat with a French bolo knife, killing four of the enemy and managing to get Roberts to safety, though sustaining many wounds himself.

In the aftermath of his heroic actions, France awarded Johnson and Roberts the Croix de guerre with star and bronze palm; making them the first-ever American soldiers in World War I to receive such an honor. Pvt. Johnson's valor was even publicly praised by Gen. Pershing in an article in The Saturday Evening Post, and he was discharged in 1919 at the rank of Sergeant, complete with a victory parade in New York City. Unfortunately Johnson's notoriety would be of little use to him upon his return to civilian life; due to his wounds he was unable to return to work, even to his old porter job. For a time Johnson conducted a brief series of lecture tours but these soon became unpopular as he was unwilling to stick to many of the established fictions (such as the notion that white and Black American soldiers harmoniously fought side-by-side in the trenches), and he died in relative obscurity in 1929... though he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

On June 2, 2015, Johnson was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama. On June 5, 2023, the former Fort Polk in Leesville, Louisiana was formally renamed to Fort Johnson in his honor.

(A glimmer of encouragement this Memorial Day --mind you, it is only the merest glimmer): the army.mil biographical page about Sgt. Johnson, at least as of this month, includes a prominent banner that reads: "We have deliberately taken some of our webpages offline in order to comply with Executive Orders and OSD Policy. The intent is to preserve our history, and we are working to re-publish content as soon as possible." While this is still a far cry from undoing actual censorship of Black history, it is at least a tacit acknowledgement from the U.S. Army's policymakers that there are some problematic regulations currently getting in the way of an honest historical reckoning. Whether or not anything more decisive is to happen in the coming months, is of course still an unknown. But when I pair this development along with this week's announcement that the U.S. Naval Academy library has restored most of the 400+ books that had been yanked from its shelves because of "DEI," there is cause for minuscule amounts of optimism.

Heaven knows it is certainly a far more appropriate --and respectful-- way of honoring U.S. military service than staging an expensive Third World dictator-style military parade through the streets of Washington, D.C.)

[drconstellation]

More Half-and-Half-A-Miracle Thoughts

Part 3: The Third Archangel

Updated 10 Nov 2023

Part 1: Miracle Power Ranking is here Part 2: The Dark side of Aziraphale is here.

Before I try to put the full picture of the mighty miracle together, there is one other Archangel I want to talk about first, because yeah, if the "little" miracle had an Archangel x an Archangel x (ex-)Archangel in the equation, all working in synergy, that's some pretty serious potential power right there.

S2 has given us much to discuss about Crowley and his past. We know he is different in that he has an imagination. We know he is the only ethereal entity, angelic or demonic, who can stop time, which is no mean feat. I have a list of at least nine, possibly thirteen clues (it keeps growing! 21 clues And yes, I'm counting,) that he was once a

senior Archangel, one of the seraphim, before his Fall (but not which one in particular, for sure, alas. We can debate that later, its not important here. Really. Don't @ me about it, I'm not going to engage in this post.) They (updated link to a new discussion: the idea of Crowley previously being a very powerful angel) have all been mentioned already, none of them are new. This implies there is a huge amount of potential power that Crowley could pull upon to put into the miracle performed on Gabriel. So he is our obvious ex-Archangel in the equation.

And we already have Gabriel, in the middle.

Which just leaves us with Aziraphale, and his green-paneled waistcoat...

I've led you all on thinking he's somehow connected to Hell? Or been associating too long with Crowley? No. (Or maybe, yes? To hanging around a demon, I mean.) On one hand it does show us he is not like the other angels. On the other, it tells us something else altogether.

For all that I've been recently rabbiting on about dark horses pointing mainly to Crowley and Saraqael, we have perhaps been deftly misdirected from the biggest dark horse of all: Aziraphale as our 'missing" seraphim, Archangel Raphael, incognito.

Now, I'm certainly not the first person to suggest this at all. There have been multiple metas about it, even way back from S1. I agree with them, fwiw.

Why am I saying this now? I think this recent post about Aziraphale being present at Sodom and Gomorrah sealed it for me, especially since I had made a recent note about Raphael being the one to be assigned to escort Lot from Gomorrah. And for all that I've just discussed how dark Aziraphale can be, he is still clearly affected by what he witnessed that night, so long, long ago.

"Oh Lord, heal this bike."

Green is also the color primarily associated with Raphael, the healer. I've seen a few other colors mentioned as well (in fact, the more you search, the more confusing it gets) but mostly the color you'll see mentioned is green. And its the color Aziraphale conceals on the back side of his waistcoat. Plus he did heal Anathema (and her velocipede) back in S1 after they collided with the Bentley.

Finally, in the Islamic tradition, Raphael is known as Israfil, and he is essential to announcing the Day of Judgement, with a trumpet constantly poised at his lips, ready to blown when God so orders.

Guess who just got taken back to Heaven to start the Second Coming?

Edit: Since I first posted this, some additional information has come along to add to this. I finally bumped into a post about the wonderful golden collars in the Job minisode (It's so, so important to put at least one or two relevant tags for meta-writers like me to help find your posts readers! Then you can shit-talk in the tags all you like.) and that lead me to a webpage on basic angel symbology and the major angels, which helped to firm up a few things I'd been wondering about. One observation is angels usually go about bare-footed, but Raphael wears sandals when on Earth, as he is chief of the guarding angels, and is the guardian of the young, and watches over pilgrims and travelers. And who was wearing golden sandals during the Job minisode?

Doing some guarding of the young as well...

And Raphael is assigned to the direction of the East.

Now we have three Archangels, three seraphim, no less, side by side.

That's a mighty shitload of potential miracle power, whichever way you want to look at it. No wonder the ol' Metatrash got a bit nervous about what happened and decided to take a personal hand in things.

If your sitting there going "'Hang on, op, hang on just a darned minute - Aziraphale hasn't even been promoted to Supreme Archangel yet and Crowley could just be a Dominion, you don't know, and Gabriel's a drooling idiot, how could he contribute to it - " Just stop. Take a breath. Go back to Part 1 where I discuss the problems with our knowledge about miracle powers and their potential. Their potential. And its frustrating that in the end we just don't have enough knowledge to be certain.

So take this as my personal head-canon. I may not have really answered why the miracle was so strong. But as I said at the start, I don't think we can. Too many factors involved, too many unknowns. Too much hidden.

Bring on S3, I say!

[mariacallous]

Recently, I was using Google and stumbled upon an article that felt eerily familiar.

While searching for the latest information on Adobe’s artificial intelligence policies, I typed “adobe train ai content” into Google and switched over to the News tab. I had already seen WIRED’s coverage that appeared on the results page in the second position: “Adobe Says It Won’t Train AI Using Artists’ Work. Creatives Aren’t Convinced.” And although I didn’t recognize the name of the publication whose story sat at the very top of the results, Syrus #Blog, the headline on the article hit me with a wave of déjà vu: “When Adobe promised not to train AI on artists’ content, the creative community reacted with skepticism.”

Clicking on the top hyperlink, I found myself on a spammy website brimming with plagiarized articles that were repackaged, many of them using AI-generated illustrations at the top. In this spam article, the entire WIRED piece was copied with only slight changes to the phrasing. Even the original quotes were lifted. A single, lonely hyperlink at the bottom of the webpage, leading back to our version of the story, served as the only form of attribution.

The bot wasn’t just copying journalism in English—I found versions of this plagiarized content in 10 other languages, including many of the languages that WIRED produces content in, like Japanese and Spanish.

Articles that were originally published in outlets like Reuters and TechCrunch were also plagiarized on this blog in multiple languages and given similar AI images. During late June and early July, while I was researching this story, the website Syrus appeared to have gamed the News results for Google well enough to show up on the first page for multiple tech-related queries.

For example, I searched “competing visions google openai” and saw a TechCrunch piece at the top of Google News. Below it were articles from The Atlantic and Bloomberg comparing the rival companies’ approaches to AI development. But then, the fourth article to appear for that search, nestled right below these more reputable websites, was another Syrus #Blog piece that heavily copied the TechCrunch article in the first position.

As reported by 404 Media in January, AI-powered articles appeared multiple times for basic queries at the beginning of the year in Google News results. Two months later, Google announced significant changes to its algorithm and new spam policies, as an attempt to improve the search results. And by the end of April, Google shared that the major adjustments to remove unhelpful results from its search engine ranking system were finished. “As of April 19, we’ve completed the rollout of these changes. You’ll now see 45 percent less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results versus the 40 percent improvement we expected across this work,” wrote Elizabeth Tucker, a director of product management at Google, in a blog post.

Despite the changes, spammy content created with the help of AI remains an ongoing, prevalent issue for Google News.

“This is a really rampant problem on Google right now, and it's hard to answer specifically why it's happening,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at the marketing agency Amsive. “We've had some clients say, ‘Hey, they took our article and rehashed it with AI. It looks exactly like what we wrote in our original content but just kind of like a mumbo-jumbo, AI-rewritten version of it.’”

At first glance, it was clear to me that some of the images for Syrus’ blogs were AI generated based on the illustrations’ droopy eyes and other deformed physical features—telltale signs of AI trying to represent the human body.

Now, was the text of our article rewritten using AI? I reached out to the person behind the blog to learn more about how they made it and received confirmation via email that an Italian marketing agency created the blog. They claim to have used an AI tool as part of the writing process. “Regarding your concerns about plagiarism, we can assure you that our content creation process involves AI tools that analyze and synthesize information from various sources while always respecting intellectual property,” writes someone using the name Daniele Syrus over email.

They point to the single hyperlink at the bottom of the lifted article as sufficient attribution. While better than nothing, a link which doesn’t even mention the publication by name is not an adequate defense against plagiarism. The person also claims that the website’s goal is not to receive clicks from Google’s search engine but to test out AI algorithms in multiple languages.

When approached over email for a response, Google declined to comment about Syrus. “We don’t comment on specific websites, but our updated spam policies prohibit creating low-value, unoriginal content at scale for the purposes of ranking well on Google,” says Meghann Farnsworth, a spokesperson for Google. “We take action on sites globally that don’t follow our policies.” (Farnsworth is a former WIRED employee.)

Looking through Google’s spam policies, it appears that this blog does directly violate the company’s rules about online scraping. “Examples of abusive scraping include: … sites that copy content from other sites, modify it only slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it.” Farnsworth declined to confirm whether this blog was in violation of Google’s policies or if the company would de-rank it in Google News results based on this reporting.

What can the people who write original articles do to properly protect their work? It’s unclear. Though, after all of the conversations I’ve had with SEO experts, one major through line sticks out to me, and it’s an overarching sense of anxiety.

“Our industry suffers from some form of trauma, and I'm not even really joking about that,” says Andrew Boyd, a consultant at an online link-building service called Forte Analytica. “I think one of the main reasons for that is because there's no recourse if you're one of these publishers that's been affected. All of a sudden you wake up in the morning, and 50 percent of your traffic is gone.” According to Boyd, some websites lost a majority of their visitors during Google’s search algorithm updates over the years.

While many SEO experts are upset with the lack of transparency about Google’s biggest changes, not everyone I spoke with was critical of the prevalence of spam in search results. “Actually, Google doesn't get enough credit for this, but Google's biggest challenge is spam.” says Eli Schwartz, the author of the book Product-Led SEO. “So, despite all the complaints we have about Google’s quality now, you don’t do a search for hardware and then find adult sites. They’re doing a good enough job.” The company continues to release smaller search updates to fight against spam.

Yes, Google sometimes offers users a decent experience by protecting them from seeing sketchy pornography websites when searching unrelated, popular queries. But it remains reasonable to expect one of the most powerful companies in the world—that has considerable influence over how online content is created, distributed, and consumed—to do a better job of filtering out plagiarizing, unhelpful content from the News results.

“It's frustrating, because we see we're trying to do the right thing, and then we see so many examples of this low-quality, AI stuff outperforming us,” says Ray. “So I'm hopeful that it's temporary, but it's leading to a lot of tension and a lot of animosity in our industry, in ways that I've personally never seen before in 15 years.” Unless spammy sites with AI content are stricken from the search results, publishers will now have less incentive to produce high-quality content and, in turn, users will have less reason to trust the websites appearing at the top of Google News.

[jumpscaregoose]

leans casually on the wall. hi. if possibly could i know about the theories you have rn for the rtl groups trap reactions….👁️👁️

I can give you like.... 75% of one??? I guess???

I've been staring at kenta's character page for the past 40+ minutes trying to figure out what his deal is and I thinkkkkkkk I might be on to something? I've got nothing for anyone else this little shit is my area of expertise

mostly I've been staring at these bad boys

the meanings of the first and last ones is pretty easy to figure out, "a dangerous mind" is probably referring to his programming skills/being a little bitch and "what kind of a joke is trust" obviously means his cynical attitude towards interpersonal relationships

such as this line from the opening show look at me point proof explanationing

"hands that pulled away" is interesting though

I'll include that the google-translated version of the official website lists these for the tags in english

and while the dog pun in "unleashed hands" does not escape me, I feel like "hands that pulled away" is probably more accurate (and is more interesting)

to me, the easiest way to interpret these tags together is as a chain of causality, with "a dangerous brain" causing "hands that pulled away" causing "what kind of a joke is trust"

translating that out of nonsense talk, I'm imagining that kenta's trust and interpersonal issues were caused by someone, either a caregiver or circle of peers, "pulling away" from him in response to his "dangerous brain"

we can actually verify this, or a similar event, through the timeline:

specifically, this entry:

it's clear that this event was what led him to take up programming, and that his opinions on other people were mostly solidified by age 8 (although the exact nature of the virus he created is vague, it's easy to assume it wasn't one you'd make while worrying about other people. we've all recently seen what massive international tech issues can do)

this is the most concrete theory I can think of based on the information available but while I have your captive attention I'd like to pose a similar question-

-when the HELL did he get his phantometal?

this was where my train of thought went after staring at that webpage for so long

certainly, there's no way he received it before entering the prison system. it does make sense that phantometal would be circling within prisons, especially considering how... weird the one we see is.

again this is where MORE DETAILS would be appreciated, GCREST/AVEX

mostly, I propose a chicken-and-egg problem: do you obtain phantometal from succeeding in prison rap, or do you succeed in prison rap because you have phantometal?

also, the exact timeline of prison rap rankings is. nonexistent. HOWEVER, we can again use the timeline to make inferences. it's mentioned that he begins posting tracks online at age 13. given how the prison operates (and the tidbits I know about real life) it's highly unlikely he would have access to a computer for long enough periods to produce and upload music without the preferential treatment given to those at the top of prison rap. therefore, I posit that this prison rap success occurred around age 13.

we also know that possessing phantometal was a qualifying requirement for participation in rtl, so this narrows down our timeline ever so slightly

in my mind, the most likely circumstances for kenta to acquire his phantometal are the chicken-and-egg solutions from above, which places the final date near the one we established for prison rap, around age 13

I have a few ideas as to how he got it, but I'm gonna keep those under wraps for future evil purposes

but that's just a theory

a-

no I'm not doing it it's too easy

and cut

[ahc-au]

Can we see the other two PGA bodyguards besides of Hambone and Ro I mean I just visited the webpage and they got good potential to character introductions

Thank you! We've already met Ritter, but Lyssis hasn't shown up yet! I'll get to show off more of their drawings when we get to the guards' profile, but for now here's them:

Some brief details about them below!

Ritter's actually in charge of the guards, she's been working under Bishop for a very long time and work is pretty much their life. Nothing comes above Bishop's orders, for him. Though they don't particularly try to hide that they're an utrom, they've spent most of their life on earth and blend in effortlessly, often assumed to be human. She identifies more with human culture, and feels pretty out of place among other utrom.

Lyssis is Hambone's elder sister! She's a little higher rank, too. She can throw down with the best of them, having a list of abilities that make her a really good defense, but she's also a very nurturing personality type. She wants to see the best in everyone and help them succeed. Unlike her sister, Lyssis actually does see her coworkers as family, and is quick to emotionally adopt anyone who bonds with her. She's a gentle giant (unless you happen to be trying to assassinate her boss. Then, yknow. She's gotta beat you up.)

If you want even more deets their pages are here and here!

--Adelram

[hummussexual]

From North Africa to the Persian Gulf, from Rai to dance-pop to romantic ballads BY DANNY HAJJAR APRIL 26, 2024

ENCOMPASSING DOZENS OF countries inhabited by close to 500 million people, the Arab world is enormously diverse, and its music reflects that. Our list of the 50 best Arabic pop songs of the 21st century includes everything from Algerian rai to Egyptian dance-pop to romantic ballads from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The songs here can have traditional roots that go back many decades, but they can also reflect today’s pop trends — many do both at once.  At the end of the last century and early in this one, the music industry in the Middle East and North Africa was dominated by artists from Egypt and Lebanon, two countries that had long been cultural hubs with large commercial markets. But in the past 15 years artists from North African and the Persian Gulf have found more crossover success, though both regions had long had their own blossoming music scenes —and in the case of North Africa had produced many artists with audiences in Europe. We made the list by consulting a panel of academics, music journalists, industry professionals, historians, and artists. Sounds naturally change over time, and representing as many countries and communities as possible remained a priority as we compiled the list. The final ranking takes into account the quality of the song, its popularity, and its cultural impact. To be considered for the list, a song had to fit the traditional mold of the Arabic pop genre, or be a song by an Arabic artist in another genre that crossed over to have wide success with audiences in the region. Additionally, at least 50 percent of the song’s lyrics had to be sung in an Arabic language. Had that not been part of the criteria, this list would’ve included music from global artists like Shakira, French Montana, and Soolking.

Click on webpage for the songs.

[sunnunderthesun]

We need to talk about Sudan and its poetry

Oh, German Hitler

Oh, Italian Mussolini

Your chair will never ever stay again

You are just like

a foreign piaster

with no value in our market

The above excerpt is the English rendition of the song famously sung by the Sudanese singer Aisha Musa Ahmad, during World War Two, to encourage active Sudanese soldiers fighting the Axis alliance in the hope of gaining independence from British rule.

It is only towards the end of the last decade, during the Sudanese revolution, that the Eurocentric mainstream news sources began to shine a light on Sudan’s centuries-old oral tradition of poems, songs, storytelling, and chants which have always been an integral part of the Sudanese people’s peaceful protests against any form of oppression. While the works of notable Sudanese writers like Tayeb Salih and Mahjoub Sharif have brought international recognition for Sudan's written literature since the latter half of the twentieth century, much of the nation's oral poetic battle cry of resistance, strength, and resilience still remains unheard of in most parts of the world.

When asked why the internet hardly has any English-translated Sudanese poems written before the present century, a staff of ArabLit informs me that not many poems from the early or even mid-20th century exist, especially online, as translations from Arabic to English was mainly an academic endeavour until recently.

My search for Sudanese folklore on Google brings up just a handful of websites, books, and social media channels focussing on, mostly, contemporary Sudanese diasporic poems and stories, translated into or written in English, but it’s too challenging to find an English-translated poem by a native Sudanese poet on the search engine’s high-ranking webpages that list “must-read poems” or “great war poems” of this century and earlier.

On some archival websites, fragmentary specimens of Sudanese folklore can be found in a couple of late twentieth-century research papers on Sudan’s oral tradition, the journal called Sudan Notes and Records that was started by the British imperialists in an attempt to gain more control of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and the racist memoir called My Sudan Year in which the cultural anthropologist Ethel Stefana Drower writes, The Sudanese is a rhymester rather than a poet. He makes rhymes and rhythms on every possible occasion, but, like all of Arab blood or partly Arab blood, he is seldom capable of producing lofty lyrical poetry. The boatmen, as they tug together at a rope, or pull their oars through the water, make chanteys, but these are rarely imaginative or poetical in the Western sense of the words.

I learn from a librarian at the Library of Congress that their only available digitalized collection of Sudanese poetry is not translated from Arabic to English. However, they couldn’t clearly tell me the reason behind the dearth of English translations of Sudanese folklore, especially the ones from over a hundred years ago, on the internet.

Efforts of individuals like Dr. James Dickens and the library activist Israa Abbas to preserve and promote recent Sudanese poems and songs, both in English and Arabic, may inspire the mainstream international literary publications, that also happen to be Western-centric, to consider publishing a powerful Sudanese poem or two sometime. Observing the educated masses' continued disregard for the ongoing destruction of lives and invaluable university archives in conflict-ridden Sudan, it’s hard to predict when the internet will show more cultural inclusivity.

[digitaldetoxworld]

Page Optimization Best Practices: A Blueprint for Online Growth

 Page optimization is an essential system in virtual advertising and net development that ensures websites are person-friendly, functional, and aligned with seek engine tips. It encompasses quite a few techniques and practices aimed at improving a website's performance, visibility, and general user revel in (UX). By optimizing a page, companies and content creators can achieve better search engine ratings, force organic visitors, and ultimately enhance conversion costs. This complete manual explores the facets of page optimization, from its technical factors to consumer-centered techniques.

On-Page Optimization 

The Importance of Page Optimization

In the state-of-the-art competitive digital landscape, merely having an internet site is inadequate. Users anticipate rapid-loading, cellular-friendly, and easily navigable pages. Moreover, serps like Google prioritize web sites that supply value through optimized overall performance. Here’s why page optimization is essential:

Enhanced User Experience: Optimized pages load quickly, are visually appealing and provide intuitive navigation. This maintains users engaged and decreases bounce costs.

Higher Search Engine Rankings: Search engines reward optimized pages with better ratings, growing visibility, and natural reach.

Increased Conversions: A properly optimized web page encourages customers to take desired movements, including creating a purchase, signing up for a publication, or downloading content.

Better Accessibility: Optimization guarantees your content is on the market to all customers, such as people with disabilities, through features like alt textual content and proper structure.

Cost Efficiency: Pages optimized for speed and overall performance lessen server load and bandwidth utilization, reducing hosting expenses.

Key Elements of Page Optimization

Page optimization is multi-faceted, involving each technical and content-associated components. Below, we delve into its middle elements:

Page Speed Optimization

Page speed refers to how quickly a webpage masses its content. It's a crucial rating issue for search engines like Google and Yahoo and significantly affects consumer retention. A postponement of even a 2nd can bring about massive drops in personal engagement and conversions.

Minimize HTTP Requests: Reduce the number of factors like photographs, scripts, and CSS documents.

Compress Images: Use equipment like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to lessen image sizes without compromising quality.

Enable Browser Caching: Cache static files so returning site visitors don’t need to reload all factors.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Distribute content across more than one server to reduce latency.

Optimize Code: Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML to put off unnecessary characters.

Mobile-Friendliness

With over half of internet traffic coming from cellular gadgets, ensuring a web page is cell-pleasant is non-negotiable.

Responsive Design: Use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap to ensure the page adapts to specific screen sizes.

Viewport Settings: Define the viewport for your HTML to govern how your website is displayed on cell devices.

Clickable Elements: Ensure buttons and hyperlinks are properly sized and spaced for touchscreens.

Content Optimization

Content is at the heart of any website. Optimizing content for relevance, readability, and engagement is crucial.

Keyword Research: Identify and use goal key phrases naturally in your content.

Structured Data: Use schema markup to help serps recognize your content material.

Readability: Use brief paragraphs, subheadings, and bullet points to make content material scannable.

Engaging Visuals: Incorporate great images, movies, and infographics to complement textual content.

 On-page search engine marketing

On-page search engine marketing entails optimizing character internet pages to rank better in seek engine results.

Title Tags: Create compelling and keyword-rich titles within 50-60 characters.

Meta Descriptions: Write concise descriptions that summarize the page content material and consist of target keywords.

Header Tags (H1, H2, and so forth.): Use headers to shape content material logically and improve readability.

Internal Linking: Link to different applicable pages in your website to enhance navigation and search engine optimization.

Technical Optimization

Technical optimization makes a specialty of backend upgrades to beautify overall performance and seek engine crawlability.

Robots.Txt File: Guide engines like Google on which pages to crawl or ignore.

Canonical Tags: Avoid duplicate content material problems by specifying the favored version of a website.

SSL Certificate: Secure your website online with HTTPS to reinforce consideration and ratings.

404 Error Pages: Create consumer-friendly error pages to guide users to lower back to practical parts of your website online.

Tools for Page Optimization

Several tools can simplify and streamline the optimization manner:

Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyzes web page speed and affords actionable guidelines.

GTmetrix: Offers insights into website performance and areas for development.

Ahrefs/Semrush: Helps with keyword studies, content optimization, and search engine marketing monitoring.

Hotjar: Tracks user behavior via heatmaps and session recordings.

Strategies for Effective Page Optimization

To reap meaningful effects, you want a well-rounded strategy. Here’s a step-by-step approach:

Conduct an Audit

Before enforcing modifications, conduct a comprehensive audit to identify existing troubles. Tools like Screaming Frog or Google Analytics can reveal overall performance bottlenecks, broken hyperlinks, and content gaps.

 Prioritize User Intent

Understand your target market's wishes and design pages that cope with them. Whether users are seeking data, products, or services, make certain your content aligns with their intent.

Focus on Core Web Vitals

Google’s Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — are crucial for web page optimization. Aim to meet their benchmarks for stepped forward user revel in and scores.

 Test and Iterate

Optimization is an ongoing system. Use A/B checking out to experiment with web page layouts, calls-to-movement (CTAs), and different elements. Monitor overall performance and refine based on results.

 Keep Up with Trends

The digital landscape evolves swiftly. Stay knowledgeable about updates to look engine algorithms, layout developments, and emerging technologies.

Common Challenges and Solutions

While web page optimization gives huge advantages, it also affords challenges:

Balancing Speed and Functionality: Advanced capabilities like animations can sluggish down your website online. Use light-weight libraries and green coding to strike stability.

Content Overload: Too a whole lot of content material can crush users. Focus on turning in concise, cost-driven information.

Managing Multiple Platforms: Ensuring steady overall performance across desktop, cell, and drugs requires thorough testing and responsive design.

The Future of Page Optimization

As technology advances, web page optimization will keep evolving. Emerging tendencies like voice seek, AI-pushed personalization, and augmented truth (AR) integration will redefine consumer expectations. Websites will want to leverage these improvements at the same time as adhering to foundational optimization ideas.

Additionally, the rise of privacy policies emphasizes the want for transparent facts practices. Optimized pages will not only perform nicely but additionally build acceptance as true through secure and ethical dealing with of personal records.

[synwolf]

All about fundamentals of website design and development – A beginner’s handbook

As we all know in today’s world everyone is using websites, apps, social media platforms etc. regularly. Knowing and understanding the fundamentals of website design and development is the first step towards your website journey. We need to understand the basic things behind all these website designs, apps and platforms. There are multiple aspects to be considered in creating a website.

Have you ever came across any website and felt its very user friendly, looks great.

Have you ever thought how these websites will be designed and developed. What kind of design software they use in website designing process?

As a business owner, knowledge on website design and development is a must nowadays. This knowledge give you idea how to market your products or services in a better way.

If you are looking to learn basic of website design or confused with different concepts , this blog is one stop solution for all your learning needs.

In this beginner’s handbook we will cover all the crucial components of web design and development and also highlights key aspects to be considered when looking for the best website design and development agency in India. You can reach out to us as we are the well known website design and development company in Bangalore.

In this article we can cover all about web design and its role in business growth.

What is web design?

It is a part of website design and development includes website layout, colors , typography, user interface and other visual aspects. Web design is crucial as it makes website looks visually appealing, engaging and user friendly.

Web designer is a professional who has a skill of designing websites. Web designer must understand the website’s purpose, visual elements and the target audience.

Web designing is a creative process in which graphic designer creates a visual elements to integrate in the website.

What is website development?

Website development involves technical side of building a Website. It includes coding, server configuration, database management, and make sure the website functions as needed.

Several programming languages are used to convert a web design to a functioning website during the website development process. HTML and CSS are the most popular languages used to design a web pages.

Web developer is a professional who has the skills to develop websites.

Importance of a website in business:

A well designed website assist in multiple purposes such as

First impressions: First impression always create a long lasting impact so as the first impression of any visitors is crucial. A great web design builds trust and encourages users to explore more.

User experience(UX): Good design increases usability which helps to navigate the site and find information.

Search Engine Optimization: Web design integrates SEO best practices, by making sure that the website ranks well in search engines and improving visibility.

Conversion rates: A visually appealing and navigational website increases the rate of conversion, by transforming visitors into customers.

Key elements of Website Design

Layout:

Layout represents how a content is organized in webpage. A good layout gets user attention and will be easier to process information. Most used layout styles are:

Grid layout: This layout style uses grid system to structure content, offering a well organized look.

F-shape layout: This layout helps in enhancing usability as in this design elements align with the reading behavior. Some studies shows that users read in F- pattern.

Color scheme:

Colors evoke emotions by influencing user behavior. Factors to be considered while choosing color:

Brand identity: Select colors that reflects your brand identity

Contrast: Make sure there is contrast variation between text and background to make it readable.

Typography :

Typography has a huge impact on readability and user experience. Consider factors like:

Fonts: Use fonts that are easy to read and to maintain a cohesive look.

Hierarchy: Create a visual hierarchy by using proper size and weight making users to find the important information.

Images and graphics:

Visual elements such as images, videos , graphics and icons helps in improving website appeal. Make sure you work on factors like:

Quality: Use relevant high resolution images that matches with your content.

Loading speed: Optimize images for fast loading speed , as speed plays a major role in improving user experience and SEO

Navigation:

Having a well structured navigation is vital for better usability. Consider the following to achieve it:

Simplicity: Make sure navigation is simple

Accessibility: Ensure your website is accessible on all devices including mobile

Fundamentals of web development:

Front end development:

It refers to everything a user see and interact with website. It includes:

HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) : HTML helps in structuring the content as It is a pillar of webpages.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) : It adds styles to HTML, layout , colors and fonts.

Java script :  This is a programming language which make web pages interactive, making user experience better.

Back end development:

It focuses on server side functionality. It includes:

Server: It is a place where website’s files and data is stored. Server process requests and serves the web pages to users.

Database: Helps to store and manage data. One of the popular database is MySQL

Server-side languages: We can use languages such as PHP or python for communication between server and database.

Content Management Systems (CMS):

CMS allows users to create the digital content and manage it effortlessly. Most used CMS platform by beginners include WordPress as it is highly user friendly and customizable

Factors to consider when choosing web design and development agency:

When looking for the web design and development agency in India , follow these tips:

Review the agency’s portfolio to understand their work style and capability. Check for their various projects or clients handled which matches with your business style and vision

Check for previous clients reviews , ratings and testimonials . If there is a positive feedback then you can consider that agency.

Go through the list of services the agency offers such as web design , development , SEO , Digital Marketing and Branding.

Consider a agency which maintains transparent communication by being open to any kind of feedback and ready to collaborate and support regularly throughout the project.

We should always choose an agency that fits your budget. Get quotes, compare their services and pricing and finalize the agency that suits you best.

Why choose Synwolf as a web design and development agency?

When it comes to the best agency for web design and development , Synwolf stands high in competition as a premier choice for businesses who are looking for designing a website to take their business next level. We have a team who are creative as well as having technical expertise to design a website as per your business goals. We mainly focus on understanding your business, goals to make sure every aspect of your website from layout to functionality aligns with your vision. By prioritizing user experience we integrate eye catchy visuals that helps in getting engagement and more conversions. We maintain transparent communication over a period of designing website which allows you to collaborate with us and assist us on getting your dream website designed without any flaws and meets your expectations. Contact us today to start your journey of business growth in this online world.

Conclusion:

Understanding the basics and fundamentals included in website design and development is very essential in this digital age. Focusing on key elements like layout, color, typography and navigation you can enhance user experience. Building knowledge on these aspects helps you to navigate the world of web design and development with confidence. Whether you are creating a personal blog, e-commerce site, corporate platform or looking for a professional assistance this handbook will help in laying a foundation for your business success. If you are looking for a professional help from website design and development company make an informed decisions based on your requirements and their expertise.

Today the entire world is becoming digitalized. Most of the people spends time online for all kind of activities. Websites has become common and takes center stage in this time. We can access any kind of information at our fingertips with a website. If a company does not have a user friendly website then it going to losing most of its customers. As a business its mandatory to you to have a well designed and user friendly website. For that you need a very good and well known web design and development services in India for your business growth. Contact our team today.

[duffinamahammadou]

17 E 48th St between Madion and 5th avenue, New York City, NY 10017-1010

HatsuhSushie.com

My husband and I really enjoy sushi. We've had it many places in the USA and even in Tokyo, so we have a pretty wide field for comparison. I am writing the following review from experience, not only of dining at Hatsuhana but of how it ranks among similar sushi restaurants. Hatsuhana is the best sushi restaurant we have ever encountered in New York City.That's the simple truth. We're not the only diners who feel this way and I strongly advise that you make a reservation so you won't miss out. Whether for dinner or lunch, every seat is taken. People know what's good! The quality and freshness of the food is second to none. The chefs are true artists. On our most recent visit topansa1.com I had the tekka don and the tuna was delectable, as was every part of the dish. It was also beautifully presented. I've already mentioned how busy Hatsuhana is but even so, we never felt rushed or overlooked. Service was attentive and we felt truly welcomed. Whenever we had a question, our server had the answer and gave it patiently and graciously. Hatsuhana has some dishes that are as savory as they are intriguing. Who wouldn't want to try a Box of Dreams? I can't describe it and do it justice though I did order it in the past and was completely satisfied. So beautiful and so good! Please check out Hatsuhana's menu on their webpage to see more about this. We will be returning to Hatsuhana later this month to celebrate my birthday. I could not ask for a better gift!

[hyunggablemay]

Hatsuhana Sushi Restaurant new york city best reviews by tokyomarketing

"17 E 48th St between Madion and 5th avenue, New York City, NY 10017-1010

HatsuhSushie.com

My husband and I really enjoy sushi. We've had it many places in the USA and even in Tokyo, so we have a pretty wide field for comparison. I am writing the following review from experience, not only of dining at Hatsuhana but of how it ranks among similar sushi restaurants. Hatsuhana is the best sushi restaurant we have ever encountered in New York City.That's the simple truth. We're not the only diners who feel this way and I strongly advise that you make a reservation so you won't miss out. Whether for dinner or lunch, every seat is taken. People know what's good! The quality and freshness of the food is second to none. The chefs are true artists. On our most recent visit topansa1.com I had the tekka don and the tuna was delectable, as was every part of the dish. It was also beautifully presented. I've already mentioned how busy Hatsuhana is but even so, we never felt rushed or overlooked. Service was attentive and we felt truly welcomed. Whenever we had a question, our server had the answer and gave it patiently and graciously. Hatsuhana has some dishes that are as savory as they are intriguing. Who wouldn't want to try a Box of Dreams? I can't describe it and do it justice though I did order it in the past and was completely satisfied. So beautiful and so good! Please check out Hatsuhana's menu on their webpage to see more about this. We will be returning to Hatsuhana later this month to celebrate my birthday. I could not ask for a better gift!"