Release: AutoHotKey 2.0 final

AutoHotKey 2.0 final was released yesterday. This is venerable and well-supported freeware, commonly used for scripted desktop automation on Windows. Installer downloads via MajorGeeks also include a link to a portable version.

Regrettably it seems there is no central repository that archives all known “tested and working” AutoHotKey scripts. Perhaps there should be?

A peep at Content Marketing

I had cause to take another peep at SEO, this time specifically the role of Content Marketer. A role completely unknown to me before now. Last week I could only have guessed, if you had asked “what does a Content Marketer do?”. Yet it’s basically what I’ve been doing for decades (albeit mostly without pay).

Some maxims and tips on this topic, from my jotted notes…

Your written content should not be self-serving, even if that will please your boss. You should try to serve your intended audience first, and educate your boss about the need to place the audience first. Quality is important, and needs to be consistent. Don’t outsource your vital customer-facing writing to someone in Whereizitagain who says they’ll do it for $10 an article.

Rather surprising was the advice to never overlook or dismiss old-school methods. Handwritten letters and targeted informative direct-mail “can still work wonders”. If done from a trusted source, done correctly and especially to a receptive older audience.

A writing Content Marketeer doesn’t just churn out SEO-focused robo-articles. Which was news to me. Such a writer could be undertaking: how-to tutorials / quarterly industry reports / buyer guides and reviews / news about new releases, with a touch of analysis to add value / long-form interviews / white papers / contributions to annual reports / and making online microsites and infographics.

One might also be polishing, SEO-buffing and revising/re-formatting older media content. If that hadn’t already been done by the previous post-holder. But link-rot is ever present, and old Web links will always need to be regularly checked.

One would ensure that all of the above are sprinkled with calls-to-action and (if needed) explicit “buy now” calls, as well as SEO-derived keywords. Web links would be added at the most relevant points, and these must be coloured so as to be clearly visible as links.

Monitor the competition. Note their topics, phrases and infer any new audience profiles they might be trying to address.

Monitor the commentators and contrarians. Comment on their posts, though be careful and don’t spam or aggravate.

Occasionally coin meaningful new phrases and even words and tags (e.g. ai-gen as an easily tag to identify AI generated content). Also consider local keywords, or timely ones relating to the trade-journal or hobby-magazine lead articles / news that your audience will be reading that month. You are of course also reading these journals regularly, and ideally doing so before everyone else.

Avoid writing “Top 10”, “7 best” etc article headlines. The savvy have long since learned that such headlines lead to untrustworthy articles, most of which appear to have been written by robots.

Monitor both customers and potential customers. Get a feel for things like their literacy level and the length they like to read. Do they have the ability to ‘skim and skip’, or do they just back off when faced with a long text? Can you break up a slab of text with nicer typography and spacing, break-out boxes and pull-quotes? Pictures should be unique and tailored to both the content and the audience, ideally, not just hastily-grabbed stock. The best writer is also ideally a crack picture-researcher and accomplished picture-processor.

Build a mental map of ‘where the audience is’ in the seasonal buying cycle (e.g. they may be saving up their PayPal for Black Friday, or flat broke after a big family spend at Christmas). Also develop a map of the favoured places visited by the decision makers in the audience, and when they find time to engage/post in such places.

Explore the potential for infusing what may be a rather staid corporate “brand tone” with touches of good-natured humour and subtle “insider joke” nods to the audience. Also explore the potential for weaving developing personal stories across your output. These stories should be genuine and as close to the grassroots as possible.

Pitch ideas to the legacy media via press releases, and perhaps also pitch directly if you have a relationship with a journalist or editor.

Actively pitch ideas to bloggers, audio podcasters and especially YouTube influencers. Make sure the pitch is individual and tailored to them and their audience. An inbound Web link from a blog is (apparently) worthless for Google Search SEO ranking, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.

Make sure your content is easily shareable. But remember that not everyone does Facebook and Twitter, and in that case they can’t even see your posts on those closed services.

Don’t overlook the need for good writing in “thank you” messages, and even in receipts. Avoid flowery language and gushing cliches. Keep it simple, and add a nice straightforward coupon-code for a discount on their next purchase.

In spare moments, inventory the firm’s back catalogue of media, if that has not already been done. Is anything still useful, but gathering dust?

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That’s the gist of what I noted during my reading and listening on the topic. Please comment and let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed.

“First, catch your cat…”

There’s a new Democracy’s Library at Archive.org, a unified hub bringing together… “more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations, archived by the Internet Archive since 2006.” And they’re collecting more from governments around the world. The collection has a search box, constrained to the collection. As you might expect many documents are a little dated though many are still practical…

Flickr Foundation

A new Flickr Foundation, set to start hiring in early 2023. Among the current aims: “restore and then grow the Flickr Commons”; provide evidence about use and usefulness; and bring in new curators. If only they hadn’t locked me out of my Flickr account years ago (due to the Yahoo crash-and-burn), I’d be among them.

Microsoft Teams – no-nag

A new UserScript, Microsoft Teams – Use Web App Instead. Stops the Desktop version of Teams from nagging you, if you’ve already launched (and want to use) the almost-identical Web browser version of Teams in Edge or Chrome.

How to archive a recalcitrant forum

Task: To download and safely archive a useful but very recalcitrant user-forum, one that may be at risk of going offline.

Roadblocks:

1) The forum archives can only be accessed by drop-downs that require you to input precise from-to dates (see above). Harvesters / bots cannot get past such barriers, and cannot reach the forum’s ‘deep history’ of per-post threads.

2) Even if you had the individual URL of each and every forum thread, only a proper Web browser can get and archive each forum thread URL. Automated harvesters / bots / capture utilities are quickly blocked by the forum’s server.

3) AutoIT or the newer AutoHotKey might be a solution on Windows, by calling Internet Explorer to load the URLs and then save each as a file. But my intensive searches find only arcane code fragments, and one code function. Nothing complete or even part-way complete.

The following solution thus requires a bit of manual work, though not too much. It is for a relatively small forum or sub-forum, of technical coding advice (in this case Python for 3D software) without a great weight of images being posted. In this case there are 16 master pages of links to some 500 actual forum posts, and each post has user replies appended. Each post displays as a single scrolling page and is not paginated.

Solution:

1. Find the earliest forum thread date, then manually go through and create a per-year page that show the links to the forum threads. Save it, and also any continuation pages there may be for that year. Work through the years and, on a long-standing forum or sub-forum, you may perhaps end up with some 15-20 saved HTML pages. It should not take more than a few minutes.

2. Extract a big list of all the links in these locally saved HTML pages. I used Sobolsoft’s ‘Extract Links from Multiple HTML Pages’ Windows utility to do this, but there are other bulk link extractors.

3. Save the extracted one-per-line links list to a .TXT file, copy-paste that list to Excel and sort the list A-Z. From this sorted list you extract just the links that point to the forum threads. They should have a uniform path and pattern, allowing them to be easily identified and extracted. Save the new list to a further .TXT file.

4. Use the free Chrome-based Web browser extension DownThemAll! to load the new list .TXT (Web browser | start DownThemAll! | right-click anywhere | ‘Import from file’). You may also want to set DownThemAll! to only download one forum thread at a time (Web browser | start DownThemAll! | Cog icon in DownThemAll!’s lower right | Network | Concurrent downloads: 1).

Have DownThemAll! do the downloads. Very regrettably there is no way to have DownThemAll! save the pages from the browser to .MHT (.MHTML) or .PDF files. Just the same format as the target URLs point to.

5. Because you’re using your normal Web browser and only downloading one page/post at a time, use of DownThemAll! should not trigger any traffic blocking from the targeted forum.

Great, so you have the forum threads downloaded as .HTML files. Of course, there’s a problem. The .HTML pages being saved locally are not also saving the images. When you load one of these HTML forum pages locally, the Web browser is still loading the post’s images from the online forum server. That’s good, but we need a more permanent local file being saved.

6. The only solution I found for the next bit is the Pale Moon browser (very worthy, based on Firefox) and its free MozArchiver add-on. This add-on appears to be unique, in terms of being happy to save all open tabs (rather than just one). It saves each open tab as a portable .MHT file with embedded images. You will have to be brave though, and load 50-80 tabs at a time by drag-dropping the .html files onto Pale Moon. With my RAM and workstation, I find Pale Moon has no problem with 80 at a time. After drag-drop, pause to let the tabs all load. Then “save all tabs” to .MHTML files, which is quickly done.

It’s thus relatively easy to use this method to work through 500 or so locally-saved forums post-pages, provided they were not too image-heavy.

Then when done with each batch in Pale Moon, right-click on the left-most tab and “close all tabs to the right”. Repeat until finished.

That’s it. A slightly tedious workflow, but your recalcitrant and harvester-phobic user forum is now safely archived as portable .MHT files, one per forum thread. Good local indexing/search software (DocFetcher, DTSearch etc) should have no problem indexing local .MHT files, ready for you to do keyword searches across the local archive.

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If you ever need to convert the .MHT (.MHTML) files back, the Windows freeware MHTML Converter 1.1 will do that and has batch processing.

Canadian Cheese

Reportedly new, the Historical National Topographic System (NTS): 1:50,000 Scale Maps, Data, & GIS. This is Canada’s official portal for the nation’s free Canadian maps, created and printed from 1948 onward. Currently appears to be hosting nearly 6,000 high-res maps plus their associated data. Most maps feature cheese factories, if this curious item on the site’s sidebar facets is to be credited…

UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association

Now gearing up, here in the British Isles, the relatively new UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association…

Growing out of the Digital Humanities Research Network

…which was at dhnetwork.org.

Plans for the next few years include: a mailing-list; an annual briefing for members; a call for Special Interest Groups (deadline: 17th February 2023); and a guide to career pathways, among other ideas. There are already a couple of white papers on the site, relating to the latter.

Added to JURN

Cinema & Cie: Film and Media Studies Journal (Italian, in English)

East Asian Journal of Classical Studies, The

Nestor (Aegean studies)

Publications of the Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1879-1982).

Christian Scholar’s Review

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Journal of Field Ornithology (birds)

Also, I note that the journal Australian Garden History is now also mirrored at Archive.org.

A newb takes a peep at SEO

I had cause to read up on SEO. Yes, I — an utter newb at such things. Such an interest is rather unusual for me, since I live in an ad-free world that’s stuffed with ad-blockers and filters. Haven’t seen a TV ad for decades. At most I glance for a microsecond at a bus-shelter ad while out walking. Or flick past a PDF magazine ad. That’s it. Ads don’t exist for me, online or offline. Likewise, I have all the cruft blocked on Google Search, so I see just the search results. And there I also have Google Hit Hider, instantly removing a huge list of blocked sites from results. I’m probably a bit unusual here, but not all that much. Of UK graduates in 2016, 19% ad-blocked on mobile, 46% on desktop — according to a reliable YouGov survey of 2,500 adults. Such numbers can only have increased, not least due to Web browsers with built-in blocking of ads and trackers.

Anyway, here are notes on what I learned about SEO as a total newb.

The focus of the SEO world appears to be almost entirely on Google Search, seemingly for the AdWords capabilities but also for the rich analytics Google provides. It also helps that Google owns a third of all online trackers. If there is any serious attention paid to other search tools, there was little sign of it. Most Google searchers are said to still use 1, 2, 3 words, and maybe add a -knockout word. Some will use “inverted commas” to form a phrase. Few know how to go beyond that and use modifiers such as after: or site: or similar.

Broadly, it’s said that 40% of traffic comes from desktop PCs, and 60% from mobile. Desktop users look at and stay on a Web site longer. I wanted to know how that breaks down into navigational vs. informational searching, but it seems that soon turns into fairly granular and valuable information. Especially when it’s relevant to a market niche. Especially one involving pizza delivery and finding your local Ferrari dealership (these appear to be big in the SEO world). But I would imagine that desktop users make the most informational and deep-informational searches, once hordes of casual “write my essay for me” student searches are discounted.

I wasn’t aware (being smartphone averse, as well as ad-averse) that these days mobile users often use voice for search. Rather than searching by typing. Either way, search words are often mis-spelled or badly chosen. Variants are often used, which the marketing dept. might not even be aware of without some heavy SEO keyword research.

Searches from buyers can further break down into general solution-solving buying vs. direct brand buying vs. trial users (e.g ‘try before you buy’, tool-hire and ‘borrow from a mate’, or even ‘watch a hands-on YouTube demo’). Informational searches can turn into buying decisions much later, often after some form of personal consultation (e.g. boss, kids, spouse, fellow forum users). Marketeers may not be aware of all the requirements of a user, simply by taking a quick look at search terms. Behind a search the buying user may have a mental tick-list of many factors that will be considered in due course. Many will also go on to buy offline, after online research. And that’s not just about “seeing the item” before you buy. Couriers can still be big barrier to home delivery, though ‘click and collect’ and Amazon lockers have somewhat solved that problem.

Surprisingly, it’s said that being No. 1 in Google Search results or AdWords is not a good position to be in. 3rd or 4th might be better, or so UK research claims.

The usual factors need an initial check before one plunges into SEO. Site speed and individual page-load speed. Also A-B taste testing re: layouts, colours, usability, and which hot-spots people tend to click on when at a vital “buy now” page. Wheel your known buyers into the labs, feed them nibbles, and have them clickety-click for a few hours. Watch what they do.

Before SEO you would also need to give the site a health-check for major problems. Try to get rid of any links involving hijacked domains now in the hands of spammers; fix content not accessible to bots (which can include content accessible only via clicking from a drop-down menu, something many academic journals are guilty of); ditch anything that pops up or slides in and gets in the way of a purchase decision; and those vile “sign up to our mailing-list” whole-page blockers. More generally consider if you just have a horrid website that simply causes people to back away and go elsewhere. Even on a great site, the most important landing page should be both perfect and helpful. It may not be, at present.

Anything effectively dead should be fixed; dead “404” links; “sorry” pages with no re-directs; pages that might appear to insult the visitor if the page is missing (“you seem to be lost, idiot”); and in this category also sits bad date signals (e.g. old pages dated “1999” etc).

You also need to thoroughly fix the point-of-purchase. For instance, if you don’t accept PayPal and guarantee to send by regular Royal Mail second-class postage in a jiffy-bag, Grandma ain’t buying from you. She doesn’t do credit cards and couriers. Nor do her school-age grand-kids. Much the same is true of higher-level purchasers — don’t get in their way, or let delivery problems stop the purchase.

With the website patched up it’s said that you then go on to make a general topics map that draws on the expertise in a business, and that this should be aware of seasonality (e.g. spring, summer beach holidays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas etc). This is done before you get into forming a “keywords plan” using a Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet builder is aware that the list of a firm’s specific product-names may not map onto searcher terms, and will also need to factor in national variant spellings, neologisms, and any slang used among sub-groups of buyers.

Then starts the process of building the “keywords plan” spreadsheet, on which there is abundant detailed DIY information available.

Many SEO people appear to find the competitor websites, which have already gone through the SEO process, to be a good way to harvest keywords. But the competitors probably did the same, and there’s said to be a risk of an echo-chamber developing in which vital factors can be missed.

Internally, it’s said that you should talk to the sales people after the marketing dept. Then you can use the face-to-face sales people to try to filter out the marketing-speak that normal people don’t use. Other useful sources are the firm’s on-site search box and discussion forums (official or unofficial). Try also to get up-to-date on customer expectations, and what their range of current problems are. Many will be trying to find a solution to a problem, rather than your specific product.

Once you have your keywords spreadsheet filled, you then rank the words and phrases, classify them by searcher intent, break them down into sub-sets and clusters, colour-code and so on. At this point some wizardry and pixie-dust is sprinkled as you plug in data from SEO sites that specialise in selling information. Such as how many hits per month your word is likely to get, its reputed value in your market niche and so on. If a word or phrase is high difficulty / high cost, many will try to break it down into a cluster of related sub-words that will be cheaper to tackle.

Less relevant keywords should apparently not be discarded, as your content-writer can buff them by writing articles based around these words or phrases. SEO content writing for a genuine audience (rather than the Googlebot) is an art in itself, and article title and pictures / infographics are said to be especially important. If you already have older semi-defunct articles that look and feel old, you either re-write or give them a ‘noindex’ flag so they’re no longer seen on Google.

Less relevant words may also lead to sales way down the line, perhaps months or years later. Sometimes words come back into vogue, or are suddenly ‘lit up’ by a news story. So hide them rather then delete them from the spreadsheet “plan”.

Then you take your finished “keywords plan” and use it to overhaul the website content and write new content. Making sure it’s accessible to all, and refraining from anything Google doesn’t like. Such as “keyword stuffing” or “clickbait articles”. Every quarter you update the plan and seek out new keywords or phrases, and tweak the content as much as you can while adding fresh articles. At the same time you’re also monitoring what works or doesn’t, building inbound Web links from top sites, and trying to get genuine real people to talk about your stuff and link to it.

That seems to be it, at least according to my various notes. SEO gurus, please feel free to point out where I’ve misunderstood or overlooked something.