Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here’s a link to an unknown (and as-yet-unpublished) Voynich “literary mystery” for late 2009: Adam Hammonds posted a brief description of his Voynich / Tepenecz book “Impossible Objects” on his blog. But… Adam who?, I hear you ask.

A little Google-fu reveals that he lives in Brooklyn, and has been posting to the ‘Absolute Write’ writers forums since September 2008. He apparently has a fiancée and likes Thai food; he likes Premier League football (and so is probably English, or else he’d call it “sah-crrr“) and in the last few days has been taken on by William Clark Associates (literary agents). Hooray! *clink*

Yet these days, being a first time novelist is no fun: now that PCs are so ubiquitous and cheap, you only have (say) a billion-ish other people competing with you to the death. Advances are frugal, royalties are more pared to the bone than ever before (don’t hold your breath for that cheque-y to arrive), while few fiction writers have made a cent from e-publishing. In the face of the ongoing collapse of traditional publishing, the whole notion of actually making money from being a writer seems to me to be both wonderfully mad and horribly outdated. I want to applaud and to cry at the same time: I don’t believe there’s any rational middle ground left between the two extrema.

Hmmm… I think I’ll get back in my box, now. Sorry!

2009 begins, and – at long last – Cipher Mysteries has lurched back up to PageRank 3 (“PR3”), which is the height it had reached back when it was still with Blogger.

But because of all the super-duper WordPress plugins (like Tim Trott’s Folding Categories plugin, etc), visitors are now finding more of what they’re interested in here, and then staying on the blog for nearly twice as long as they used to – and all the major browsers are able to index the site far more comprehensively than they used to. Twice as many visitors per day reading twice as many pages is good news all round, I’d say. 🙂

One intriguing thing is that nearly 50% of recent Cipher Mysteries visitors use Firefox 1.x as their browser: so, what’s so wrong with FireFox 2.x or FireFox 3.x, then?

All the same, even though WordPress is such a better platform than Blogger, there are still many, many things I’d like/plan/hope to fix: for example…

• Even though I’ve installed a WordPress plugin (“CSS-Compress”) to serve up compressed CSS files (this would help to reduce the initial load-time), this apparently isn’t working. 🙁 [Fixed: bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’) needed to be in header.php for the plugin to work, oops]
• The SEO Pager plugin isn’t producing any CSS (don’t know why, though I’d guess it’s probably a PHP 4 issue), so the page-numbers at the bottom don’t have nice little boxes around them. 🙁
• I’d love to make small icons inline in the CSS, but Internet Explorers before version 8 don’t handle these (boo, hiss), so I’d have to do browser-conditional stuff when generating the CSS
• I ought to get the hosting company to upgrade the server to PHP 5
• I ought to ask the hosting company to install eAccelerator to speed up PHP bytecode generation
• I ought to ask the hosting company to turn on MySQL caching
• Is there a WordPress performance profiling plugin out there? Is there an easy way of working out which plugins are slowing the page-loading down (apart from just turning them off)?

…and so forth. These kinds of things could halve the loading time for the blog: but maybe I’m just kidding myself that they would make a difference, perhaps it’s fast enough already.

Anyway… a Happy New Year to you all! 🙂

A few weeks back, I posted about perhaps meeting up in London to dole out a few of my towering pile of Voynich- and cipher-related books over a pint or two. Well, here’s a date, time and place for it: 6.30pm, 5th January 2009, at the Cittie of York pub on Chancery Lane.

Anybody who wants to turn up, let me know beforehand what you’d like to borrow from my library, or any other book I’ve reviewed or mentioned here along the way, and I’ll bring it along for you. Philip Neal is after my copy of Mary D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma”, while Marke Fincher is after my copy of James Morrison’s “The Astrolabe”:  but there’s plenty of others on the shelves.

See you there! 😉

Just so you know, replacing vowels by their next letter in the alphabet is known as “the magical cipher”: though Caterina Sforza used it in a few of her recipes in the 15th century, it was centuries old even then. This kind of cipher is used not so much for secrecy, but instead for ritual and wonder. All of which is simply a thin cryptographic pretext for me to say: K hppf ypx hbve b mbgkcbl Chrkstmbs! 🙂

First off, a huge thank you to all the subscribers and the more than 2,000 visitors to Cipher Mysteries. Adding in the roughly 8,100 visitors to my old Voynich News site, traffic has now broken through the 10,000 visitor mark – next stop 100,000.

This is despite the new site’s PageRank still floundering at a lowly PR2: search engine makes up only 20% of hits. Despite a brief period when it was 90th or so for Google searches for “Voynich”, it has since sunk back down to around 110+ (bah!). If I was paranoid, I would ask (having just moved from Blogger) “is it coz I is WordPress?” – but, more realistically, it’s probably because I haven’t fully engaged with the world of tweaks and pain associated with what is now known as “PageRank Sculpting”. If you use WordPress, there’s a good guide to PageRank Sculpting here.

This is a side of blogging nobody tells you about: while anyone can put up a blog in minutes, it can take months to engineer it to the point that search engines will link to it. Oh well!

When I migrated this blog from Blogger to WordPress, all the accumulated Google PageRank “goodwill” got lost too: and so even though Cipher Mysteries has exactly the same text as Voynich News (but better categorized etc), it has a rather meagre PR2 (“PageRank 2”) rather than PR3. And so all the Google search-engine traffic to the blog disappeared overnight.

However, things might now be on the mend, and PR3 might just be within reach again. Google Blogsearch now rates Cipher Mysteries as the #1 blog for “Voynich” (which is a pretty good start), and rates it highly enough for a pre-list mention for “cipher”. And if you Google the web for “voynich”, Cipher Mysteries now pops up at #97 – pretty awful, agreed, but not bad considering that it was at #350 not so very long ago. 😮

The point here for all Googlers is that PageRank is a non-semantic algorithm that relies on the wisdom of the crowd of web content writers, and their supposed eagerness to link to authoritative content. Yet there’s a flaw: bloggers are not encyclopedists, but more like jackdaws with ADD, passing on links to that-which-sparkles 20x more than to that-which-is-of-use.

Moreover, sidebar lists of links (i.e. repeated across multiple pages with the same text) to external sites tend to yield practically zero weight in Google’s schema.

Put it together this way, and it should be brutally apparent that our perception of what is to be found with Google has become largely conditioned not by authority but rather by fashion. Google’s reliance on PageRank has therefore become a curiously double-edged sword, one singularly unable to help us cut through the swathe of semantic dross out there (such as, I don’t know, the 50+ million pages on “Paris Hilton”).

In short, I think the web may now be at the point where PageRank hinders Google’s ability to be useful – “the end of Google 1.0”, you might say. Not that a MegaCorp like that would stay still: perhaps it will split into two to cover the two very different types of searches – say, “Google Surface” (for superficial, faddy, fashionista searches, biased towards YouTube and blogs) and “Google Content” (for semantic searching, valuing original content over copied content).

To a certain degree, you can see this at play already: the more words you include in a search string, the more Google veers away from the PageRank-dominated Google Surface sphere towards the semantic-based Google Content zone. As it stands, Google functions as an uneasy alchemical marriage of these two: but I’m increasingly finding myself dissatisfied by its search results, and I can’t be alone in this.

Really, I’m not anti-Google at all (just imagine a world where we only had a Microsoft-branded search engine): but I do wonder whether we’re now close to (or even past!) the time for Google to reinvent its core search algorithms.