Those that follow this blog will know that I split it into two distinct pieces when I set up Words You Don’t Know (.com) about 4 months ago. Well I’m doing it again, by splitting off all the technology writing that I do (75% of what I write, to tell the truth) to a new web site, entitled The Virtual Circle (.com). If you visit this site, you’ll notice that it is not quite complete but very close to it.

The Virtual Circle

The Virtual Circle is intended to become an IT Site with some social networking capability and, it is also intended to become a platform for others that wish to post technical articles. At the moment the social networking capabilities are invisible. It will also accept other IT Analysts and other IT professionals as contributors. Again the capabilities for that are not visible either.

The point of this posting is simply to warn you that all my further blog postings relating to IT will now happen on The Virtual Circle…

Until recently HaveMacWillBlog made sense as a web site into which I could pour just about anything I chose to write about. In April of this year I wrote the posting 10 Words You Don’t Know. I didn’t particularly think it would generate traffic, but it did. It generated traffic in a big way.

What is Big?

Neophite bloggers don’t really know what constitutes good traffic. Well good traffic varies. If you write for CNET or The Register, then a well written piece will pull in thousands of readers, but that’s the power of a high Google ranking.With a lowly blog, unless someone links to you from a popular site, most blog postings – even those that merit attention, will rarely get more than a few hundred reads – and it will even take a long time to rack that number up.

However a good posting, with an attractive title, like Sex and the Naked Vampire will pull in thousands, because that’s how the world works. (That particular posting is up around the 7000 mark).

When I began blogging properly in 2007, rather than posting things here and there, I averaged about a hundred to two hundred readers per day. The numbers began to rise in time as more sites linked to me. Here’s a graph of the traffic:

Most of the rise in traffic since April can be attributed to the Words You Dont Know postings. There have been traffic storms with, on the odd day or two, thousands of visitors.  It began with a link from Stumble Upon, and continued with a MetaFilter link, and a link from a Belgian site, and from various blogs – all of which generated unusually high traffic. Those postings now account for half the traffic on this blog.

Anyway, the Have Mac Will Blog web site doesn’t make much sense any more because it has two distinct traffic lanes; the wordies and the techies, and there’s not a great deal of overlap. It’s become too much of a grab bag. So it has undergone mitosis. It has split like an amoeba into two distinct sites, one of which is now called: Words You Don’t Know.

I’ve been busy, in the web development sense. Truth is, I’ve spent hours, even days, making changes to this blog. I’m juggling a series of ideas, trying to reconcile them and apply them and make them useful for the the future.

A Blog Is  Dismal Thing

Although the HaveMacWillBlog title and url indicates otherwise, this site isn’t intended to be a blog, in the sense that the word “blog” is normally used – i.e.

Blog: an on-line journal where diary are posted relating to personal experiences and hobbies; “postings on a blog are usually in chronological order”

It was intended to be a collection of articles that were primarily about technology, but also anything else that seemed worth writing about. And there is a hobby involved, which involves messing with cameras and with PhotoShop – which is why various brief photo-essays wind up on this site. However, it’s very difficult to do something like this without writing entries that are also journal or diary entries.

All of which is an attempt to explain or justify the gradual redesign of the site, which is taking place. There is now an extensive set of mechanisms for navigating the site, which should make it possible for anyone to find any posting that has even been made to the site (about 800 pages at the moment).

So the following changes have been made:

• A Home Page (entitled The Landing Page) has been created that lists recent articles, giving the first few paragraphs of the three most recent articles and links other recent articles.
• A Blog Page (entitled A Day In The Life) has been created which will only list journal/diary type entries.
• Navigation Pages: I’ve added a wide variety of navigation options. If you’re looking for something finding it should be possible somehow.
• A Download Page: This will allow me to have downloads that are either paid-for or given away.

Another nuance included is the publishing of various links that I’ve collected over the years of useful, entertaining or simply odd web sites or pages. These are published on a random basis scattered around in between adverts.

There is also “straws in the wind” a set of links to recent news stories that may be significant in one way or another. They can be classified as significant news that I don’t have time to comment on.

The Birth of a Magazine

In the gradual evolution of all this the goal has been to work towards producing a “magazine site” that has the characteristics of being a magazine (varied content.) At the same time I’ve been developing two “sister” web sites – the development not being of content, but of an engine to make the sites function. This site will serve as the blog site for those two sites – so the blog entries on this site will cover activties on those sites.

I’m winding all this up for a kind of New Year launch.

I’m hoping there’s method in my madness. Building this blog site has turned into an exercise in mastering the PHP programing language. Imho PHP is a very very bad programming language, but also an insanely powerful one. We’re very lucky that it hasn’t fallen into the hands of a rabid dictator. The world would not be safe.

PHP has a deep but impossibly involved relationship with HTML, so much so that you always find the two deeply intertwined. PHP has the usual set of programing constructs, but it is weakly typed (not for purist this language) and needs to be developed interactively, in a process that involves tweaking CSS commands and doing unspeakable things to character strings. No wonder Ruby has become so popular.

Once you’ve messed with PHP long enough, and made it obey your every other command, you become convinced that you’ve acquired a skill – and indeed you haven’t. What has happened is that you’ve become trapped in the orbit of an intellectual black hole, from which there is no escape. As you gradually descend closer and closer to this black hole, you reach the “event horizon”, a place where you become convinced that you can use PHP to implement an event driven environment.

Once you go beyond the event horizon, it’s over. Beyond that point, emails and SMS messages can no longer escape and the only people you can communicate with are other coders who have become similarly trapped.

Courtesy of PHP

There are two new capabilities, which don’t on the surface of thinsg look complicated, but they we a bitch to program in PHP. They are;

1. The popularity navigator – which takes you to a page that will display which postings are the most popular, gathering data in real time.
2. The skin shedder – which takes you to a frustrating page, which would have let you change the skin of the web site  if you’d arrived at the right time – but the odds are 90 to 1 that you didn’t – so you can’t. What can I say: life’s hard and then you die.

Both capabilities are attached to buttons on the right hand side of postings….

If you really want to know what a semantic search capability is, you can either read what I’ve written here or simply push on the “cloud button” in the right hand column. I’ve not only been briefed on this technology, I’ve actually implemented it. That’s sounds a little grandiose, but implementing it didn’t involve much more work than adding a video to a posting, because it amounts to the same thing. You paste a little bit of javascript onto a page.

What do you mean, Semantic?

The burgeoning hype around Web 3.0 is almost palpable. It’s certainly surfable. The underlying reality is simply this:

Searching with current search engines is truly limited.

It is word-based, not meaning-based. You search the web using only “atoms” of meaning (i.e. single words) that are completely devoid of context. To provide a simple example, if I search for “queen” the search engine can only guess whether I’m interested in female monarchs, or universities, colleges, ships or hotels that bear the name Queen or the rock band called Queen.

As search engine users we try to get around this by searching on several words, but while this may help with context, it has the unwelcome consequence of excluding some web pages we might be interested in. So if we search on “Queen Rock Band” we will improve context significantly – although we may still retrieve some pages that tell of a rock band playing in the presence of a female monarch, or at some college or university that bears the name “Queen.” We will also eliminate some web pages about Queen, the Rock Band that just don’t happen to mention the words “rock band” on the page. That’s the tyranny of the exact match.

Sponsored Link: Semantic Targeting

The great hope of the semantic web (Web 3.0) is that we will be able to search on meaning rather than words and as we search we will not inadvertently exclude pages we may have an interest in, and we will definitely exclude the irrelevant. It will be like using a rifle rather than a blunderbuss.

Quintura as a Semantic Search Capability

Quintura provides a cloud of words, like a tag cloud, (just like del.icio.us and many blogs) but the tag cloud is not generated by people, it is determined according to a kind of tree of meaning (you could use the term “ontology”). Quintura indexes a site in order to build its semantic map of the pages. This results in a set of indexes that is significantly better than a tag cloud.

You can step through the cloud and it will retrieve relevant web pages according to the path you take. Alternatively you can add one term from the cloud to another and it will narrow the search, but it will do so according to meaning. You can enter any word and it will form a “cloud of meaning” around that word based on the pages it has indexed.

It’s best to play with Quintura to appreciate what it can do. I found it fun and also useful, and that’s why I implemented it. There are about 750 pages on this web site, amounting to somewhere between half a million and a million words. Quintura has indexed them all and, it has linked together their “meaning” – so you can now search this site semantically. There’s also a Google Search on this site, so you can compare the results that the two searches give you. (I concluded that Quintura was significantly better, but I already know what’s on this site ,so I don’t correspond to a typical user.)

Quintura has one brilliant capability in that, as you step from one word to another in its “cloud of words” it throws up relevant pages dynamically. The experience is much better than descending through page after page of irrelevant results.

When you get bored with going through this web site, you can go to Quintura.com and surf the whole web.

This kind of search capability will become commonplace soon. It’s a genuine improvement.