Some free WordPress.com users will be used to responding to the Bell in the top-right of their blog’s User Interface. They may now be wondering what’s happened there. Clicking on the Bell should open a sidebar list of recent posts and responses. It now never loads.

It’s part of the slow and stop-start changeover from the old editor to the horrible new Block editor (the free Open Live Writer desktop software is the alternative for free users).

To get to your Bell alerts now, when in ../wp-admin/.. you instead swing over to the other side of the screen, and click on “My Sites”…

This then gets you the newer interface…

Swing back over to the Bell, now blue. Your alerts will now load…

Then you click back to the ../wp-admin/.. UI.

As for Open Live Writer, it only lacks access to this Bell, and to the blog’s uploaded Media Library. All other WordPress blogging functions are in there, though sometimes you need to right-click on a seemingly-plain icon to find its advanced options (like loading a list of the scheduled posts).

I’m happy to report success with testing a gig on Fiverr that offers to Download an entire website from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. I put in a test order for a site archived in late 2015, a technical forum for some graphics production software. The forum had abruptly vanished on being sold to a larger business.

While it is possible to do what Joseph is offering for free, the only options appear to be Linux, command-line, or a couple of subscription/paid Cloud services. For a mere $6 it thus seemed worth finding out what Joseph could do.

He delivered a 310mb .zip containing 1.1Gb of archive from a given date. It was a script-driven .PHP forum site, but that caused no fuss. I didn’t expect him to re-work links to make a working site again, for that reason. Though apparently he can do that, on simpler HTML sites.

On my desktop PC dtSearch then indexed all text in the extracted files, regardless of file-type, and thus enabled keyword-search across the archive. If you need freeware on that point, then DocFetcher is a good free equivalent to the paid dtSearch.

To block the auto-suggestions on Archive.org search, add the following to uBlock Origin’s “My Filters” list, save and reload the page…

Before…

After…

Index on Censorship (now only has a four-issue paywall)

+

Wellcome Open Research

PDFs at the Mexican mega-aggregator Biblat. Much can be missed by the Scielo’s, especially in Brazil, so hopefully this will help fill in the gaps.

This is how a great many American newspapers now treat online visitors from outside America. Like criminals.

This was the art exhibition report I had wanted to take a quick look at…

… which could be had with a VPN that let me pretend to be in the USA. Perhaps the world now needs an automatic “auto-detect a xenophobic block, switch on VPN and reload” browser plugin for these legacy newspapers?

Fashion Studies

Open Access journals and monographs from All’Insegna del Giglio (Italy), such as A Monastery by the Sea: Archaeological Research at San Quirico di Populonia and Arimnestos

Annoying. It appears that Google Search no longer allows the chaining of site: and inurl: in the same search query.

For instance…

site:www.moma.org/documents/ inurl:catalogue -“press release”

site:www.moma.org inurl:catalog

… and similar variants.

DuckDuckGo search has no such problem, though for full-text .PDFs you do need to knock out the MoMA giftshop at store.moma.org …

site:moma.org/documents/ inurl:catalogue -store

And the Duck censors certain results. Presumably certain MoMA catalogues are from artists whose names trigger the censorship filters?

2 million pictures extracted from the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Search: bookcollectionbiodiversity | Flickr. Size and crispness is of course variable, due to the nature of the materials, but there are plenty of good 2MP-sized picture to be found.

Not currently well indexed by Google Images, so one can’t do a site: + “Larger than 4MP” search in a useful manner. Nor is Flickr’s own search very good, seemingly. For instance, from 2 million images Flickr can only find 7 for the keyword “flower”…

The Economist has a new monthly magazine for long-form high-quality writing, 1843, which replaces their previous Intelligent Life title. Free, for now, although I vaguely seem to remember that Intelligent Life wasn’t paywalled. There are also a few daily bits, to keep the search-engines nibbling…

Oops, nearly missed this! JURN is now four years old.