Category: Blogging

Fun search terms

~ Inquisitor

Someone has found my blog using the search term "videos of dwarf football" (on AOL Search UK).

Hmm. No dwarf football here, sorry. And not much football or videos, full stop. Oh well, hope he found what he was looking for.

At least it’s for charity

~ Inquisitor

But I suspect whoever it was that came up with this thing will almost certainly get "FIRED!" soon enough.

I mean, who actually needs a talking head of Alan Sugar that'll point its finger at you every once in a while? It's like an even more annoying Billy Bass (link very NSFW.) And the Amstrad page says they're trying to contact Matt Lucas…

But while we're at it, thank you all for beating my hits record – I've made 50 hits today. Hopefully, I'll be able to write more, but in the meantime, enjoy the links.

(Piece considering That'll Teach 'Em S3 coming up – my piece on the 2004 season has now been retrieved and placed in articles.)

Sorry about the blog drought

~ Inquisitor

Just haven't thought of anything actually decent to write about recently; I've had a pretty boring week, all told, and I'm too jaded about the Hewitt/Prescott/Clarke trifecta to actually have anything decent to write about them. BTW, thanks Google for all the hits on my articles about the crappy England World Cup song (30+ a day) – hope you guys enjoyed them.

So have a link to this cute peregrine webcam, plus the accompanying diary, and I'll actually have something to write about soon. Maybe quite soon.

(Windows Media Player required; may not work in Firefox, it doesn't for me, but you can extract the URL from the Media tab in View Page Info – it's the only Object on the page – and paste it into WMP fairly easily.)

I guess it’s my one month blogiversary

~ Inquisitor

So, once again, I've got to say how much I like wordpress.com – it really is exactly what I've always wanted from a blogging service, apart from the styling.

To all the people who've seen this blog: thank you. More articles hopefully on the way; just takes time to write them. 

This is very strange…

~ Inquisitor

My blog dashboard has shown up in the "Top Posts from around wordpress.com" section on my blog dashboard. I know I do access it rather often, but surely it shouldn't show up in a top posts area…

My first blog spam!

~ Inquisitor

On my oldest post to make sure I didn't see it; obvious spam sign.

Aw, such a shame it got caught in moderation (automatic moderation for first posters is on). But it's a rite of passage that all of us have to go through at some point, and I feel proud to be worthy of spammer slime.

Spam follows:

Have you ever been to 'you tube'? they let you host videos there and you can hotlink them on your blogs. it's really cool and you don't have to bandwidth on the videos, cause its free.

I have a policy of naming and shaming blog spammers, so…

  • Spammer is at [66.207.210.226], owned by Beanfield Technologies
  • Attempts to joejob YouTube, the popular video sharing website; links to scumbag's YouTube profile, user name "newsmaniac", who appears to be related to the website nakednews.com. Scumbag registered only five hours ago; suspicious or what?
  • Email address is supposedly "newsyoutube@yahoo.com". Yeah right.

Since when did a naked news website need spamming? Even through a two-level scheme of user's URL to YouTube profile to pornsite? Oh, the world we live in.

I have crystallised my rule set into a simple comments policy, which can basically be summarised in one line: if you're not a spammer and you're not out to cause trouble, welcome.

The problem with the WordPress theme changer

~ Inquisitor

…is that it changes live rather than giving you a preview. Grr. I’ve just gone through eight themes and find out big disadvantages in each of them…

In any case, I’ve settled on andreas09 for now: it at least uses up your entire browser window, as opposed to the last one I was using (I don’t mind a little whitespace, but I have a 1280×1024 screen and too much whitespace is seriously irritating.) This one should hopefully be a bit more permanent.

New theme

~ Inquisitor

I think this one is preferable to the previous one, to be honest – it may be very simple, but it works, and it’s not as cluttered as the other one. Enjoy.

Welcome to “The Hard Sell”

~ Inquisitor

This is the fourth incarnation of my personal blog, and the first hosted on wordpress.com.

I used to write my blog by hand, and it got annoying after a while. I persisted, though. Now, the disadvantages are becoming clear: I can’t do many of the things that bloggers everywhere take for granted, even with the automated Thingamablog solution I used for the previous blog. The most important, for me, was being able to post from places other than my broadband connection.

So I considered a number of options:

  • Upgrading to Blueyonder’s higher web tier and installing something – no MySQL, so no MT or WordPress hosted
  • Blogger by FTP – can’t FTP to my site from outside the provider’s space, and Blogger’s apparently quite unreliable lately…
  • Paying for a hosting provider – bandwidth limits a go-go

Thankfully, I discovered wordpress.com. Sure, I can only use one of their provided styles – and the site might change a bit until I find one I really like – but otherwise, it’s exactly what I needed. It provides easy access from anywhere, it moderates comments, it’s WordPress, it doesn’t force adverts on you and it’s free. So I went straight for it, and I must say I’m liking it more and more.

And the obvious question: what is “the hard sell”? Simply a comment on our society as a whole, something that everyone has been taken in by, me and you included. Also, it’s the title of the perennially redrafted novel I’ve been writing for a very long time. Hope you enjoy the blog.