Day: 4 February 2026
-
OpenBenches reaches Tenerife
This weekend, I helped OpenBenches extend its reach to Tenerife, by finding and photographing a bench in the memorial garden for the Dan-Air Flight 1008 disaster. Almost-simultaneously, Terence Eden shared a blog post about the cost of running the OpenBenches service. Taken together, that feels like an excuse for me to plug the project (again)!
-
Off the back of my project to un-suckify BBC News' RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) by removing non-news content and duplicate items, I received an email this week (addressing me by the wrong name, I might add) from somebody who asked if I could do the same... for the Daily Mail.
I'm so very tempted to provide an empty RSS feed and say "there you go; that's an RSS feed of the Daily Mail but with the crap bits removed".
Turns out my distaste for the Daily Mail is greater than my love of clean RSS.
Alt
Email from Simon G to Dan Q, subject "Dail Mail RSS that doesn't suck", with message: Hey Darren, I’ve come across your BBC RSS feeds and find them really useful over the last few days. Thank you so much for this!! I’m not sure how easy it is but could you do something similar with the Daily Mail as that has thousands of reposts a week? Happy to contribute/donate.
-
Gamified... Pornography?
When the Online Safety Act came into effect, I considered writing a blog post investigating exactly how difficult it made it to access Pornhub. But it turned out to be boringly easy (it's not NOW, of course!), so I didn't. So here's a different discovery I made about the site...