I finally started my first project to create cornerstone content. This is a fascinating thing about the internet and search engines. Having a hundred small pages on a subject does not get you to rank nearly as high as having a single substantial page. So given that I have at least a couple dozen pages on various aspects of Don Quixote, I’m in the process of creating just such a page. But it will be months in the making. I just wrote the beginning of it. The article is called, Don Quixote in English Language Translation.

Thus far, it is all original content. In fact, the article is worth checking out. I talk about what Don Quixote is. People think of it as a novel, but it’s actually two novels. And they are rather different. It’s too bad that the first novel isn’t published alone any more. As it is, I think the thickness of the book puts people off. And the first novel stands all by itself. In fact, there really is nothing in the second book that is part of our cultural identity. And I say that as one who thinks that second novel is superior. Anyway, check it out. Even though it is a page (as opposed to a post, which is what this article is), you can still leave comments.

Eventually, I will get to the point of doing a summary of the stuff I’ve written about on the blog. This is actually kind of backwards. The idea of cornerstone content is that you are supposed to start with that. But who thinks about such things when you start a blog? In fact, even after all my work with Quality Nonsense (where I always have to think about SEO), I didn’t think about this kind of stuff on Frankly Curious. My thinking started to change when I installed the Yoast plugin for WordPress.

Yoast is a bit of nag software that reminds you of things and alerts you to things that you do wrong. For example, it has you assign a “focus keyword” for each post. For this article, it is “cornerstone content.” And then it is very unhappy if it constitutes less than 0.5% of the words you’ve written. At the same time, it doesn’t like it if it represents more than 2.5%, because apparently Google will think that you are “keyword stuffing” and would potentially see the page as spam.

How Cornerstone Content Will Make Us Famous!

Another big thing that Yoast does is keep track of the focus keywords that you’ve used in the past. If you’ve used the focus keyword once before, it warns you and mentions that you might check out it’s page, Using Cornerstone Content to Make Your Site Rank. But if you’ve used the focus keyword more than once before, it complains. It’s complained a lot about “Donald Trump” and “Bernie Sanders” and “Hillary Clinton.” Which, makes me think that the next election cycle I might start a page for the election itself. That’s undoubtedly what smart and experienced bloggers do.

In addition to this, my “boss” Toni thinks that Frankly Curious gets half the traffic that it ought to considering the quantity and quality of the content. And I would definitely like to get more traffic. And that’s especially true when it comes to something like Don Quixote. the truth is that there aren’t really any sites that answer the common question, “Which Don Quixote should I read?” And given the fact that I’m also a big advocate for the book, I’d like to have more people ending up here.

But using cornerstone content has a good aspect to it that has nothing to do with making the site more popular. I do want to put together all my thoughts on Don Quixote and other subjects. Just the same, most people are not interested in reading 20,000 word articles. So this is perfect. People can get here because Google likes these long articles, but then they can quickly find links to specific information that they are looking for.

Of course, I don’t know how well this is all going to work. The experts claim this is the way you are supposed to do things. Right now, a search of “don quixote translations” brings up my very old article, About to Read Don Quixote in the top ten. It’s a clever idea for an article but I know infinitely more now. And I’m keen to share that knowledge.

Normal people don’t even know what imperative programming is. Even most programmers are at most vaguely aware of the different classes of programming languages. But there are a lot of programming paradigms.

For example, there is logic programming, which is unlike what most people even think of as a programming language. You can get an idea about it by checking out Prolog. In it, you don’t say, “Do this, then do that.” You define relationships and then ask the system questions. It’s pretty far abstracted from what a computer is actually doing. And the same is true of the object-oriented programming paradigm. And this is why people should stay away from these kinds of paradigms when they first start coding.

My big boss sent me an article recently, 30 Years Later, QBasic Is Still the Best. In it, Nicolas Bize talks about how he introduced his son to programming with QBasic and how easily his son picked up on it. So QBasic rocks, am I right?! But he doesn’t dive into why QBasic worked so well for his son. Because the issue is not QBasic or the Basic programming language at all. The issue is that it is easiest to learn simple imperative programming languages: languages where you tell the computer, “Do this, then do that.”

The reason is that they model the natural way that we go about solving problems. Here’s an example of a bit of imperative programming that pretty much everyone has written:

IF "Man on sidewalk ahead is having angry conversation with himself"
THEN "Cross the street."

In more traditional code, it would look like this:

crossStreet = 0;
crazyBehavior = 1;

if crazyBehavior = 1
  crossStreet = 1;

In object-oriented programming, it’s far less direct. The man would be an object. One of the object’s characteristics would be crazyBehavior. The object would have functions for setting and reading crazyBehavior. There are lots of reasons why this is a better way to code. And one of those reasons is that it makes the code more abstract. But that also makes it that much more difficult for someone new to programming to learn what’s actually going on.

When I first learned to program for Microsoft Windows, it was in the imperative programming language, C. The basis of every program was running a function that returned any messages that had been sent to the program. Then, the program would loop through all the messages that it was interested in. Is the message to redraw the window? Then I’ll do that! Is the message to resize the window? Then I’ll do that! And so on.

But later, I wrote everything with C++, an object-oriented language. In that, these was no checking for messages. Instead I just wrote functions for objects to do the things that needed to be done, and all that messiness of checking messages was gone. Sure, it was still in the code somewhere. But it didn’t involve me as a programmer. And if I had never coded the old imperative programming way, I wouldn’t have had much of an idea what was really going on.

Computers are stupid. So the closer you are to how they really work, the easier it is to understand. It just so happens that the closer you are to how they really work, the more work you have to do. So there is a very good reason to program using high level abstractions. But it is no way to learn.

Yet Nicolas Bize is in the minority when it comes to programmers. If you ask most programmers what language you should learn because you are just starting out, they will usually scoff at things like Basic or Fortran or even C. Personally, I think people who want to learn programming should start with some form of simple Basic. Then they should learn assembly language or take a course in digital electronics. Then they can branch out into other languages where they can be more productive. But by that time, they will understand how computers work.

As you may already be aware, this post did not start with, “On this day in…” That’s because I decided, only today, that I’m not going to do regular anniversary posts anymore. I’m not going to do morning music posts either. There are various reasons for this, not the least of which is that they have become too rote. But the biggest reason is that I find they are taking away from the fluidity of the blog. Pretty much every day, I find that there are two feature articles that I want to post. But I don’t have the time.

So I’m going to go back to writing about whatever I find that is interesting. As a going concern, the anniversary posts and morning music will go away. But the posts about historical events and music will not go away. In fact, the other day, I had wanted to write something that I considered insightful about a song, but it didn’t fit into the theme this last week. What’s more, it would have been a lot longer an article and I didn’t want to waste the effort on de rigueur posts that I just don’t think are as important in the grander scheme of the blog.

Doing these daily posts made sense when I was running Frankly Curious as a publishing house. They were always supposed to be two easy ones I could do to go along with what was an ever growing schedule of feature articles. But from now on, I’m taking the site back to my original intent: whatever interests me. And the truth is things are just piling up. Before I started writing this, I closed about a dozen tabs related to articles I had wanted to write about. But I still have many up that I hope I can now get to:

• How NAFTA affected Mexico;
• Acrophobia and free will;
• The Game of Life and non-goal oriented entertainment;
• Medieval currency and modern monetary policy;
• Fun as a goal of education.

And that’s just some of them. That last one reflects on this decision, because doing the anniversary posts and morning music were not fun for me anymore. And I want to enjoy my time at Frankly Curious, because it is a major part of my social life. And it has always been the random nature of Frankly Curious that made it interesting. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. It’s the place to go to check out what’s on my mind. I can assure you, yesterday, the sinking of the Lusitania, was not on my mind.

At the same time, I’m in the process of creating what’s called “cornerstone content.” There are certain things I’ve written about a lot, and I want to create major pages (not posts) for them. Right now, I’m working on one for Don Quixote. As it is, I think that Google ought to rank such a page at number one for “Don Quixote translations.” (Currently, I think I’m at about number nine.) I’m one of very few people who write about all the English translations. And I’d like to get all my thoughts in one place.

Anyway, with the morning music and anniversary posts gone, I am expecting to do two feature articles per day. I’m planning to stick with the one scheduled post at 11:05 am. And then another one at some other random time. But I’m not going to kill myself on that. And I may post pointers to updates in pages that I’m working on. Regardless, I won’t be working any less. I’ll just be working differently. Goodbye morning music and anniversary posts.

One of the best things about my day job is that I come upon a lot of old computer lore — things like INTERCAL. And the other day, a request came in for a resource page on BBC BASIC. I’d never heard of it, and I figured that the “BBC” must be a coincidence. But no. It indeed stands for the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was a programming language developed especially for a television series on BBC2 called, The Computer Programme.

The BBC is a public institution and so it actually believes in educating the public as well as entertaining it. And back in 1979, someone at the broadcaster decided that they really ought to inform their viewers about this brave new world of computers. But they wanted to do it in a very hands-on way. The problem at that time was that there were a zillion computers. There were things like the Sinclair ZX80, which are hard to imagine as computers at all. But regardless of that, they were all different, and what the BBC needed for The Computer Programme was consistency.

So they had a computer built, the BBC Micro — built on an 8-bit 6502 chip, which was hugely popular until the 8086 family became dominant. It was created by Acorn Computers. (Acorn was later purchased by Broadcom, which was bought just last year by Avago Technologies to form Broadcom Limited. It’s the nature of the computer business.) It sold at the time for £235 (about a thousand dollars today.) The new machine needed an interface, and as old-timers like me remember, that almost always meant some form of Basic. So they had a very young Sophie Wilson lead the project to create BBC BASIC.

The Computer Programme Begins!

This was all put together, and on 11 January 1982, the first episode of The Computer Programme appeared. And as you will see if you watch the first episode embedded below, it’s really good. It starts off with a discussion of Stonehenge as an early computer that eventually had to be abandoned because it was so difficult to reprogram to accommodate changing astronomical variables (eg, precession). And then they move onto computer punch cards and how they relate to silicon chips. And before you know it, they are playing a break-out pong game on the BBC Micro.

What I most like about this episode is a short reported segment about a woman who owns a candy store. She had earlier bought a computer and started doing all her accounting and inventory on it. She says that it saves her hours of work every day. But the main thing is that you can see she loves computers. I remember feeling the same way. I bought my first computer to do music on, but almost immediately, I was creating programs to calculate the value of pi and the number of atoms in the universe. It’s very addictive.

It turns out that the candy store woman has branched out and is now doing computer work for other businesses. The reporter asks her if she hopes that the computer business takes off, and the woman is very keen on this. She explains that because of some change in the traffic flow of the area, the shop has not been doing too well. Given that the woman seems like she’s about 50 years old, she comes off as heroic.

By 1982, personal computers weren’t that new a thing. But it was still a heady time with all kinds of different machines. It’s fascinating to look back on it all. Today it isn’t computers that are interesting but the network itself. In those days, you were on a computer. Today, virtually everything I do is online. The computer is just a portal — more like a television than computational machine.

Google knows me better than I know myself

Much of the work I do has to do with website management and hosting. And so recently, I found myself editing a massive FAQ — roughly half the length of a novel. It was not exactly fun — at least at first; once it started to take shape, it was fun. But I found myself trying to explain to my 83 year old father what I was doing. He doesn’t even know what an FAQ is, so I was trying to find a way to explain the problem of trying to create a structure out of a collection of disparate information. And I said, “There might be information about, I don’t know, iPage.”

That was the example that came to mind: iPage. If I just started brainstorming, I could probably come up with a hundred web hosting companies. But it was iPage that popped into my mind yesterday evening. Then, this morning, I did what I normally do: I got a cup of tea and drank it while I did my political reading. And the ad on the left popped up. And that disturbed me.

Let me be clear what I am not saying. I’m not saying, “Geez, it sure is amazing that Google knows what I’ve been doing!” The fact that advertising follows me from site to site isn’t surprising. It is one of the first things people learn when they get on the internet. And I’m used to this. Not long ago, I was writing an article about Matlab, and so for a week after it, I was getting Matlab ads.

This is an interesting thing about being a freelance writer: ads tend to be very badly targeted toward me because what I’m searching for is only interesting to me for an hour or two. To give you some idea, my direct boss asked me to expand a document about how freelancers should submit their invoices. I said, “That’s a great idea; I didn’t realize we had a document like that!” And she said, “You wrote it.” Indeed I had: just two months ago. But I don’t remember things. You do them and then you move on to something else.

Anyway, the point is that I’m not surprised that some web hosting company I’ve been writing about starts getting advertised to me. But I wasn’t writing or researching anything about iPage. But clearly, I spend a lot of time on websites that talk about web hosting. And so I doubtless was on a page that was talking about iPage. And that’s why it was the hosting company that came into my mind and the one that Google thought I would like to see this morning.

I had a similar experience several years ago. I was at the grocery store staring at several rows of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Now, I like Ben & Jerry’s, but it isn’t my favorite ice cream. And as I looked at the selection, I remembered that earlier that day I had seen a banner ad for Ben & Jerry’s. It’s upsetting to be reminded of just how easily we are manipulated. But we are just very complicated machines. We are largely predictable.

I know that Google doesn’t know that I mentioned iPage to my father last night. But I do think that Google knew that iPage was on my mind, even though I wasn’t conscious of it. It’s creepy. And it will only get more so. Remember Transient Global Amnesia?

Consciousness is a joke.