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 [...] Read more »
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 [...] Read more »
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 [...] Read more »
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 [...] Read more »
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 [...] Read more »
In many ways, I have to concede that “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell is a fun little novelistic riff on all things Shakespearean: a series of people die in recreations of famous First Folio fatalities, while the main character (who is chasing after a lost play called “Cardenio”) recoils from each gory death while girding herself [...] Read more »
I decided to do a bit of site admin over the last few days, by at least trying to tidy up any outstanding issues lurking in the Cipher Mysteries site, mostly from the changeover from Blogger to WordPress. While doing this, I noticed that the site had suddenly dropped about 300 places in Google’s rating [...] Read more »
Much as I hate to admit it, semicolons are terribly old-fashioned; look, now that I’ve consciously used one, I feel like saying “Harrumph!“, “2nd inst.“, “Yrs etc.” In fact, these days it would be a pretty safe bet that more semicolons are used for winking smileys than for punctuation.
Yet here’s a lovely little [...] Read more »
The Voynich Manuscript belongs to an elite club of mysterious and as-yet-unread historical artefacts. But might this club be about to lose a member?
An article in the July-August 2008 edition of the archaeology journal Minerva (as reported by the Times) declares that the Phaistos Disc may well be a hoax. Having already debunked a number [...] Read more »
Another day, another curiously contentful blog to set me thinking: this time it’s Alterati, “The Inside Scoop on The Outside Culture”, and specifically a two-part article there from October 2007 entitled “The Yellow Sign: Manuscripts, Codices, and Grimoires“.
In Part 1, the discussion swoops from our old friend the Codex Seraphinianus (yet again), to Borges’ Tlön, [...] Read more »
