Marginalia
Viktor Lofgren
My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of websites on a common theme. If you find yourself clicking a link and ending up on a page that looks completely different, that’s just how things are.
July 2026
Top Words
- marginalia
- search
- index
- software
- years
- grant
- crawler
- astrolabe
- internet
- query
All posts (137)
Don’t chase small optimizations Said some smart person at some particular time, probably. If not, he ought to have; if worse comes to worst, I’m declaring it now. The cost of 2% here and 0.5% there is high, and the benefits are (by definition) low. I have been optimizing Astrolabe, my search engine. The different...
I find if I do not regularly plant interesting thoughts in my mind, it will rarely grow them spontaneously. I need to read interesting books, or have interesting conversations; if I do not, I’ll look back at my ideas and find I haven’t really had any in a very long time. Thoughts will grow whether I take care to...
I’m in the midst of rebuilding the index of my search engine to allow for better search results, and I’ve yet again found need to revisit how I handle link farms. It’s an ongoing arms race between search engines and link farmers to adjust (and circumvent) the detection algorithms. Detection and mitigation of link...
I’m struck by how easy it is to read things on Gemini. Not just skimming, but actual reading, like you would a book. Not everything written is great, but it’s usually worth reading all the same. Venturing out into the land of contemporary HTML is different, and it’s not a subtle difference. I’ve written before about...
gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2021/07/07.1 I felt the need to add some thoughts tangentially related to this post by Sean Conner. Why do we hold unit tests in such high regard? Enterprise software development (Agile with a TM at the end), and to an increasing degree open source software development has really...
Something you probably know, but may not have thought about a lot is that the Internet is large. It is unbelievably vast beyond any human comprehension. What you think of as “The Internet” is a tiny fraction of that vast space with its billions upon billions of websites. We use various technologies, such as link...
For a long while, I have been puzzled by the strangest problem: My attention span is really bad when I use a computer. I’m an avid reader of esoteric books. I have (recently) read the notoriously dry Confessions of Saint Augustine in print, it was a slog for certain, but it really doesn’t compare with the struggles...
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