| BlueSky | https://bsky.app/profile/pigsonthewing.org.uk |
| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pigsonthewing |
| Website | https://pigsonthewing.org.uk |
| ORCID | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5882-6823 |
For privacy reasons, I use a Microsoft Hotmail address for some purposes.
When I log on to it, it displays the account's verification address as an optional method of confirming my ID.
That shows my personal domain, and so would link the address to me, for any attacker trying to log in.
This happens in new private windows, so is not cookie based.
There doesn't seem to be an option to turn it off, or to select the option to verify by password as the default.
After more than a decade, the prize-winning™ ORCID plug-in for WordPress, which I conceived and Roy Boverhof kindly and skilfully coded, has been updated, with significant improvements, and new features.
Use this if you have a WordPress blog and you or your commenters use ORCID iDs
🆕 blog! “OpenBenches 💖 OpenStreetMap”
When Liz and I created the OpenBenches website, it was just designed to be a fun way for people to record memorial benches. Since then things have got out of hand and we now have over thirty-nine thousand benches recorded!
Our plan was never to compete with something like OpenStreetMap. The OSM project is vast, complex, and…
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/11/openbenches-%f0%9f%92%96-openstreetmap/
⸻
#OpenBenches #OpenStreetMap
When Liz and I created the OpenBenches website, it was just designed to be a fun way for people to record memorial benches. Since then things have got out of hand and we now have over thirty-nine thousand benches recorded! Our plan was never to compete with something like OpenStreetMap. The OSM project is vast, complex, and brilliant - we are small, simple, and differently brilliant. But, over…
Six years and 4 months after I requested it, we now have GeoJSON download from Wikidata queries!
KML & GPX should be available soon, too.
[works best on desktop; mouse over right-hand edge to get menu with download link]
As part of a time-limited trial, yesterday we removed the www.bbc.co.uk & www.bbc.com robots.txt "block" on *one* GenAI crawler.
Here's a graph of total daily requests from that 1 GenAI crawler by content-type. You'll note, they've retrieved ~460k web pages in ~16 hours, so a mean of ~28,750 web pages per hour. They'll likely pull ~690k pages today, ~32GB egress.
Whilst this is a drop in the ocean versus our other traffic, I can easily see how this could sink a smaller website.
Here's a blog post by the Museum Data Service, about the work I've been doing as their Wikimedian in Residence
https://museumdata.uk/blog/putting-uk-collections-on-the-map/
Hey, fedi #Unicode nerds! 
#OpenStreetMap's Andy Mabbett (@Pigsonthewing) is asking whether anyone knows about any instances of the #OrdnanceSurvey's bench mark symbol appearing in actual print, on a page. Looks a bit like ⭱ or ⤒ but a broader arrow. Usually found carved on stone or brick all over the UK/ROI.
Their goal is to propose it as a Unicode symbol! https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/os-bench-mark-symbol-in-printed-documents/128182
Any known international usage of this symbol would doubtless be appreciated too
@harry_wood In case this is of interest:
https://pigsonthewing.org.uk/developer-needed-wikidata-geographical-data/
@lea_bei Hi, You may enjoy this Wikipedia article, which I just wrote, and where I cited your work:
Seasonal Haiku:
Deflated Santa
Your garden looks like there was
A Christmas massacre
Terence Eden
Neil Craig
AndrewC (migrating to ohai)