04 Oct 2025

A couple of weeks ago I put this blog into “hibernation”, which meant I:

• unpublished links to the RSS feeds
• completely removed site navigation
• unpublished a few posts I’ve just undone all those changes, so we’re back to normal.

I’m cursed with a distinctive name – shared by literally no-one else who has a findable internet presence. Apart from the current Pope, who’s nearly there, but not nearly enough. And a long-dead Belgian cyclist.

Normally, this would be a good thing, but over the years I’ve created a more or less closed blogging network by stopping Google from indexing this site. And that is how I like it – I have no interest in discoverability, reach, scale and all the other gruesome markers of the commodified web.

But I am still indirectly findable if you search for my name. I do have a “professional” site designed for just that purpose, but because people link to this website using phrases such as [my name] writes… a search for [my name] will return those sites. Follow the link from there and you will end up… here.

This is how the web works, so I’m not complaining, and I am grateful (and surprised) when folk take time to write a response to something I’ve written. It’s just that I don’t necessarily want people searching for the professional me to find, say, an article on how I don’t think you should put analytics on your blog because they’re rooted in a military/commercial mindset. (Note to self: avoid clickbait titles. I’ve been doing this long enough – and worked with SEO long enough – to understand how a “good” title is 90% of the work in getting noticed.)

So this is a probably intractable problem that will rumble on. It might mean more hibernation periods, or me just accepting that you can never hide on the web.