Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2025-05)

Updated 2025-05-16.
Tech updates: AdSense slowly back on, invisible improvement...
Randomising the scope for consulting on considering a grass-roots movement to form a citizens' assembly to set terms for a Royal Commission to guide the forming of a ministerial task force to consider the scoping and creation of a focus group to sketch terms of reference for a study group to outline the agenda for a pre-meeting to form a steering group to get ready to think about upgrading the RPi server, easy does it...

2025-05-15: Invisible Efficiency Tweak

A few days ago I adjusted (mainly) the script that runs every minute to respond to grid frequency drops, and added (crowbarred in!) a couple of dozen lines of code to reduce our electricity consumption by ~15% (~1.5kWh/d) for half the year, and no one else in the house has noticed yet, nor should they! Also it should help keep the kitchen cooler in summer.

Also (3 for the price of 1!) I am now being nicer to the grid 4pm to 7pm, spilling any excess and not diverting it for DHW.

2025-05-05: AdSense Ads off the Naughty Step

On I found Google apparently stuffing Gemini AI house ads into my pages without the usual mechanism for a visitor to reject them as unwanted. I had to dig around in the AdSense consoled to block ads mentioning Gemini in text. (They were all Google Workspace ads; as of today there are some Gemini-free.) Google does not even advertise under its own name. Given what an over-hyped carbon-spewing deceit this current AI wave is I was incensed enough to immediately yank essentially all Google ads from EOU. That meant first turning 'auto ads' off in the AdSense console, then adding new ad controls to my page generation scripts, then forcing rebuilds of all pages that were at that moment hosting ads to remove their embedded Google AdSense JavaScript.

As of today I have re-enabled most Google ads. It will take a week or so before the most popular pages get rebuilt to contain the Google JavaScript to allow AdSense ads for them again.

I started support for increasing ad density in winter (when more people are looking at my pages, and budgets may be higher), and conversely lightening the ad load a little at other times.

2025-05-10: AI yuck continues

Google is still spouting Gemini ads on my site that cannot be reported by me as an EOU site user as 'inappropriate' (or 'do not like'), and that cannot be found and blocked by me as an AdSense user under "Google LLC" or "Gemini", which seems pretty smelly to me. I also cannot block google.com as an advertiser in AdSense. I have blocked workspace.google.com and cloud.google.com in AdSense under "Brand Safety" after taking a wild guess as to what those ads are booked under, but I should be able to get at that URL directly without guessing. (I did later find some more ways to block more Gemini ads once I have managed to locate them, but they keep coming.)

I am close to shutting down my entire AndSense account and blocking all Google ad domains in my browser; this is unnecessary and very very shifty behaviour by Google. It is not like Google does not know how to facilitate search, including in the blocking controls for AdSense.

2025-05-15: first significant revenue this month

5p today, on top of 1p smeared out over the whole of the month so far.

I shall avoid spending it all in one shop.

Most eligible pages were rebuilt with AdSense in them ~4 days ago.