I was recently participating in a forum thread on the worst pop video ever made. Boy there were some bad ones but this one just made me fall of my chair. As far as serious mucic videos go, someone, somewhere, someday, is going to be somewhat embarrassed. So if you have 3 minutes and need a laugh, then this is unmissable!
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Just been watching the Ryder Cup – gripping stuff and you have to say the USA fully deserved their win. The only thing that bothers me now is that he press in the UK, being what they are, are going to jump all over Nick Faldo and try to turn public opinion against him. It’s a sad way of life, but that’s how the press operate.
The truth of the matter is, Faldo has never been that popular, so any chance to have a dig at him will no doubt be taken by the armchair journalists quick to see a opportunity to sell a few more rags. We all wondered whether the decision not to take Clarke and Monty might backfire, but IMO the decision was vindicated by Ian Poulter’s superb performance, and Casey wasn’t that bad taking Read the rest of this entry »
I had a problem in Wordpress where in a category listing, the “previous” and “forward” links were returning a 404 error. I am using custom permalinks (/%category%/%postname%) and just couldn’t get it to work. Tried all sorts of fixes recommended at various places, but none seemed to fix it and I didn’t want to change the permalinks because the pages are in Google already and changing them would break the links.
However, I found a simple plugin from Doug Smith that sorts this known bug out:
http://barefootdevelopment.blogspot.com/2007/11/fix-for-wordpress-paging-problem.html
Cheers Doug 
I take part in the FA Premier League Fantasy Football every year…if you haven’t tried it then you really must, it’s excellent and beats all other fantasy football games hands down. I’ve been playing this one for 5 years now, since it was run by a couple of guys off their own back and before the FAPL bought it over.
The thing I really like about this fantasy game is that there are few restrictions. While many games limit you to 1 or 2 subs and once you’ve made the changes, that’s it, you can spend hours on this one (if you feel so inclined) chopping and changing your team around every week. Every Friday I’m there, doing my subs, and every Saturday from 3pm to 5pm I have it open and watch the points accrue in real-time.
There are of course a number of tips I can offer if you play it (over 1,000,000 others do!) . So here are my Top 3…just don’t Read the rest of this entry »
Tuesday September 2nd: The first entry in my golf diary! I’m keeping this for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s just so I can track how my golf handicap is doing, and as a nice reminder to look back on when my mates start giving me grief over how rubbish I am.
Played golf with Andy P today. He’s off 18, bandit, so I gave him the usual 6 strokes on the Woosnam Course at Dale Hill (Flimwell, Kent, England). A really strange round. It’s been 2 or 3 rounds since I even lost one ball, yet alone 5 as i did today! But conversely, I equalled my all time “birdie best” with 3 of the critters and hit 6 pars on top of that, so in the end, much to Andy’s disgust, I won 1-up. It went down the 18th as we were all-square until I won the 17th, but thankfully the pressure didn’t get to me, and lunch was on him…again 
Sunday September 7th: Played against “Bod” over at his course, Kings Hill in West Malling. Nice course all year round because of the excellent drainage. He said it was a “free” round, but the voucher ran out in May so £30 it was to be. Had some lunch first and whatever was in the all-day-breakfast got me off to a fantastic start – 1 under par after 6 holes including 3 birdies. Was 3 up. My main aim after that was to try and get one more birdie to beat my all-time best.
Bod plays off 10 at the moment, so he was giving me 2 strokes. Trouble is, after the first 6 it went a bit haywire – no pars in 5 holes and he parred them all, so I went 2 down. However a nice 12 foot putt at the 14th gave me the elusive 4th birdie, so despite going down 2 and 1, I went home happy. Actually we flew round, teeing off at 1.45 and getting in at 4.30 – very unusual for Kings Hill!
Friday September 19th: First day of the Ryder Cup so arranged to meet Ads at Dale Hill for 9 holes on the Old Course prior to watching the fourballs in the clubhouse. Awful start…duffed off the tee…and found myself 2 down after 3. Thankfully, Ads went a bit tits-up after that and I put in a few pars to win 3&1. We played the 10th on the way back to the clubhouse. “You can’t reach the water off the tee Ads”. Oops. Sorry. No shots worth remembering, apart from Ads’ tee shot on the 5th straight into a tree about 50 yards off the tee, but the chilli pizza in the clubhouse was very memorable and highly recommended (£5.50).
Part 1 – An introduction.
Ever since I first stumbled on the web, I’ve joined the no-doubt countless millions in trying to work out how I can use it earn a crust. Yeah, yeah…I’ve seen the “make money online“, “get rich quick“, “make a million without getting out of bed“ crap a million times over. And I’m, not stupid (so my mum says) so I know it is just pie in the sky, but I also know that you can make money online if you know your niche. So it took me a few years of experimenting, but now get to work from home with no phone-calls, no customers, no hassle in a job I love and no-one to answer to…yay!
As a mention on my About Me page that you probably added to the “too boring to read” category, I am an “affiliate”, self employed and earning a living from running a website…well, several websites in fact. I thought it might help some if I detailed just what I tried “online” to make money, what worked for me, what didn’t and why.
My ultimate goal was to find a job I could do on my own, on my own terms, with as litle contact with the outside world as possible, or at least, contact that I wanted rather than contact I didn’t want! I’ve employed people before now and it’s a pet hate, made twice as difficult and much more expensive than it should be by employer guidelines here in the UK. Would I employ again? In the words of Alan Partrdige Read the rest of this entry »
Determining the best Wordpress plugins obviously has a degree of individual judgement and dependence on what exactly you want your Wordprss installation to be able to do. From my perspective, I generally want my blog to rank well, be easy to navigate and allow me to integrate different media types.
I’ve already dealt with the SEO plugins I use, and I have tried a lot of WP plugins, so here are the others that I just can’t do without. All of these plugins work on Wordpress 2.61 and earlier versions unless stated (I know, because I use them).
The aLinks plugin is fantastic and the first one I setup every time. It basically allows you to input “keyphrases” and links, so that every time a word or phrase appears in any post or page on your blog, it changes it to the link you want. You can set it up to link multiple times or just once on a page, specify targets (like new windows) and use it for external links and Read the rest of this entry »
This week’s heated media coverage over the broadcasting of the England football matches on Pay-TV channel Setanta raises an interesting sub-plot IMO. That of sport and the patriotic togetherness that International matches (in any sport) create is being sacrificed to make more people richer than they need to be.
I’ll be fair here though. If someone waved £10 million in my face and said I couldn’t wave the Union Jack anymore, I’d take it without a second thought. But then I don’t have something that the Nation wants! Probably.
I remember years ago, we used to sit in the pub and discuss who won the boxing, take an interest, get some mates together and often even watch it. Now? I haven’t heard anyone outside the media even mention it. I couldn’t begin to tell you who the big name fighters are now. I do know that Amir Khan fought on Saturday, and I found out a couple of days later he lost. No idea who to though. And all this is because Sky and whoever runs boxing these days charges £15 a pop to watch the fight. Quite simply, you’re either a big fan or you don’t bother, but I guess it’s become a minority sport now and the interest just isn’t Read the rest of this entry »
Those who know me know I used to have a passion for the band Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark (aka OMD). I used to collect records, CDs and stuff by the band and still to this day have a huge collection of special editions, promos, test pressings, imports and unusual items. Actually I have considered breaking it up on several occasions but for whatever reason decided not to. Can’t play the vinyl anymore though 
Anyway, after a few years in the wilderness doing other stuff, it appears Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, the two founder members, are back together and out on tour. In fact they went out last year and did their “Architecture & Morality” album live with a string of hits at the back end of the show. I just bought the 2007 tour DVD (see pic) as I missed the tour Read the rest of this entry »
A lot of sites are designed with the navigation menus either on the left hand side or at the top of the page. While this has logic from a user perspective, it’s not great from an SEO perspective as the search engine “spiders” dump all your HTML and read the text. That text includes link anchors, alt tags on images and title tags etc etc. So clearly if your links come before the page content itself, chances are it’s going to mark down your content relevance a little.
However there are a couple of tricks that allow you to keep your site navigation at the top or to the left, yet make sure it appears to the search engines after all your much more relevant text.
Let’s assume that you want to keep your navigation where it is, and deal firstly with links at the top of the page. The trick here is to use “absolute positioning”. This is slightly easier if you use a fixed-width site but can be achieved with fluid designs. More often than not, you will be able to easily work out how far from the top of the screen your links should be, so that’s one problem made easier. For “left positioning”, this will depend on your design. The key is to put your links Read the rest of this entry »