Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2025-10)

Ads have generally not been allowed on the m-dot / mobile / lite site since those users' bandwidth may be most precious.

However, I want to probe if there is significant potential revenue there, for I have added a 'soft' configuration parameter to allow me to turn this stuff on and off more easily.

Some (podcast) RSS users want all the text of all the episodes in the RSS feed. I do not want to do that since:

• Detailed HTML styling and other control (eg for efficiency) does not seem possible.
• It is a terrible redundant waste of bandwidth for a full archive feed, with every reader having to pay over and over in full for items of no interest or already read.

However, what I have now done, where safe (no lurking HTML tags nor entities), I append the pgintro paragraph to the RSS description for new-ish episodes (up to ~90 days old).

Feed bloat is capped, but readers get to see a little more to reel them in...

Google keeps claiming that I do not publish the ads.txt for my hd.org zone/domain, though it never moved or went away. So today rather than yet again manually convince Google to actually look at the URL unchanged for years, I removed all ads for the zone and dropped authorisation in AdSense. Google's (tiny) loss I think, if it cannot get some basics right.

I gave Sitebulb 8.10 a whirl and found/fixed a few minor errors such as subtle broken internal links.

But Sitebulb claimed that the majority of my HTML pages are so badly broken that browsers may not be even able to display them. Those pages pass validation with the W3C validator and others, and work fine in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Lynx... (I suspect I know exactly why, because of a valid minification that I use.)

So that suggests to me that the tool will not be much use to me for now.