Writing blog posts in ASCII only

title: Hello world ascii file date: Aug 23, 2023 version: 1.0 This is a short test document. It doesn't contain of real content but its a proof of concept how to use the ASCII file format to write a text. One two three, test.. New paragraph. New paragraph. Images are not allowed, only text can be stored in a ascii file.

2 About this blog

< Toc 

This blog is about Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Even it contains articles about programming and operating systems like Linux the focus is on AI. AI means thinking machines, game ai, neural networks, and of course practical applications like building line following robots.

As today, the blog consists of 587 posts. The earliest one were created in 2018 about the Forth language Ext4 filesystem with Forth and typesetting a paper in LaTeX. Typesetting LaTeX for somebody else

The social network section of this blog explained

This blog has a dedicated social network section. It was created as a static page from within the blogspot editor and it is shown on the sidebar permanently. The purpose of such a page is to aggregate existing content. Let us give an example.

Blogs are working with the principle in mind, that the author creates a new blogpost which is categorized according to the date. All the postings of may 2019 are put in the same folder. Additionally most blogs have a searchbox and a tag system to find previous posts. But all these properties are not enough what is needed additionally is a meta section of a blog.

A meta-section is sometimes called the about section. In most blogs, the author explains to the public what the blog is about. The meta-section can be extended with a curated playlist. A playlist is by definition a list of URLs. The playlist in the about section of a blog contains URLs to existing blogpost. And exactly this is the purpose of the social network section in the nav-bar. I've searched through my own blog and identified some of the postings which sounds interesting and put them onto the playlist. A new visitor gets on the first look an overview about the blog without browsing through all the postings. The format in the about/meta section is simple because the list is formatted with “Date, URL, comment”.

From a perspective of Web 2.0, the metasection is equal to repost existing content. Which means, in the meta-section the URL to existing piece of information is given to increase the visibility of this posting. In the meta-section not all the postings are listed only the important one. That means, some of the blogposts have an entry, and other not.

The surprising fact is, that the pageview of the metasection is the highest of the entire blog. The reason is, that this section gets updated frequently while a certain blog post is no longer relevant if it's stored in the system.

The idea behind the metapage / social network section is to track the own blog. That means the blog contains on the lower layer of new posts which are added. And on the metalevel all the content in the blog is monitored. The idea is to analyze which content is already there and how much often the content is visited.

Markdown formatting in blogspot

Hello world

second line

# onetwo

# headline
## new headline

Why blogspot is great

Some people have compared the different blog hosting websites in the internet. Blogspot is often mentioned as boring because the amount of settings is small and no plugins are available. On the other hand, blogspot has an important feature: a click on the reload button will increase the pageview counter by 1.

I've tried out in my own blog. The counter is at the beginning at 892. Now, i'm pressing the reload button in the browser and the counter is at 893. Great work. Blogspot isn't able to recognize that i'm the same user so i can manipulate the traffic counter very easily. Pressing the button, again and one more times.

In the next episode my aim is to try out if an autoit script can do the same job more efficient. As far as a know, Autoit can simulate mouseclicks and if each minute the reload button is pressed in one day the macro can produce 1440 fake visits. After one year, my blog can have up to 0.5 million pageviews without any real user interaction.

Redesign of this blog

I've discovered that in the blogspot menu it's possible to adjust the navi-bar on the right side. The first thing to do is to add a gadget for showing the traffic counter. And like all traffic counter the numbers are fake. The correct amount of pageviews right now is not 887 but it is zero. That means no one has visited the blog so far. The reason why is simple. Because Google ranked my blog at the last place, no comments were made in the blog, the content is not attractive for a mainstream audience and so on.

But i think it's funny to see the current pageview counter on a prominent position, it helps to get a realistic impression of what the difference is between a great blog read by many and a newbie blog read by nobody.