It is three years since I first discovered that Twitter was hiding tweets with links to my blog.
I’m pretty sure the root cause is the “.party” domain I used (because when I migrated from Blogger it was really cheap and I thought it kind of made sense for something political, though really I’m explicitly not party-political). Twitter seems to treat links to these little-used top level domains as probable spam.
There was an interesting incident at around the same time: links to the World Health Organisation on its “.int” domain got the same treatment. This was early in the pandemic.
Anyway, I had a workaround which was to tweet the link, copy the “t.co” shortened form, and then delete the first tweet and tweet it again with the shortened form. I think that worked at first, but not after a while.
Then I used a free subdomain, pointed it here and wrote a little static web page that could pull the path out of the URL, and generate a link to the right one. That was clunky as hell and fiddly to use.
So I have finally given in, spent a few more quid on a boring .co.uk domain, so https://www.anomalyblog.co.uk/ is the official address of this blog now.
All the old anomalyuk.party addresses still work, and I hope will do for a long time, unless it gets pointlessly expensive to keep renewing it. Most of the links on old posts here don’t work; it’s a great shame how history disappears. I was very impressed, looking at one 2011 post, that links to Robin Hanson’s “overcomingbias” still work, although he has migrated to Substack since then.
Inspired by that, I’ve done some coding to fix up the redirection from blogger, so that even the old anomalyuk.blogspot.com links now work properly, as they did when I first migrated but which I had let rot since then.
To complete the housekeeping, I’ve switched themes: as far as I can see the default themes that come with wordpress are better for a simple plain text-centric blog than most alternatives, including the one I picked back in 2017. I’ve taken one of the old ones.