When installing Wordpress, there’s a little checkbox that says:

“Allow your blog to appear on search engines like Google and Technorati?”

Whilst in the past, I’ve generally remembered to check this box, but when quickly installing this blog after the original hosting company disappeared from the planet, I didn’t.

Naturally, I made sure to set up the robots.txt file correctly, and wrote the header myself when I created the theme. I hadn’t counted on Wordpress getting in the way though.Sneakily, WP had inserted a “noindex, nofollow” into the head of each page without my knowing, and as such Google and all the others were completely ignoring my site.

So. let this be a warning, and don’t let Wordpress kill your spider.

No related posts.

Following hot on the heels of recent successes such as the ever ground-breaking My Big Decision, a top quality and not-at-all-cheap-to-make-in-these-difficult-times programme in which two sets of teenagers are sent off in VW campers to be bleated at by non-experts about their potential decision on an obvious subject, comes Snog Marry Avoid?.

The basis of Snog Marry Avoid? is so simple that even a dunderheaded fool with only the strength to remember to breathe can grasp it, and it’s aimed squrely not so much at a specific audience as at a specific timeslot that BBC3 didn’t have anything else to do with.  Basically put, they ran out of money for more Family Guy.

The format is straightforward though, having stuck with the adage of ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ Three have applied this ideal from the basic concept, right through to the production values, and even presenter and audience.  Jenny Frost is a face you may remember but you won’t know where from, and even with IMDB only 10 seconds typing away, you won’t care enough to find out.  Even typing this review, I haven’t bothered to find out.

Essentially you take the most over tarted, well, tart you can find and clean off their make up, give them a little lip gloss and a hair cut mum would approve of, and you’re sorted.  Invariably they react in a way that is a bit more “I miss my extensions, but maybe I’ll learn to like this shoulder length bob…” and before and after you show them to idiots in the street who instead of telling you to fuck off, actually have the time to grin inanely and say that they would “avoid” the Before look, and “Snog” or “Marry” the after look.

I forgot to mention probably the best of all of this, which is POD, the Personal Overhaul Digerdoo or Primally Obscene Design or something.  POD is apparently the computer who does the assessment of the subject before magically transforming them; a process we don’t see because location recording is expensive and we don’t want everyone to know that these fools are ‘made up’ by a regular BBC make up crew.

POD is entirely graphics based, and poorly made by a work experience kid who had once used photoshop to make Mellinder Messinger’s tits bigger, and was therefore consider an expert by the overstretched producer.  No doubt he handed in the final graphics just before asking “Could you sign my work log for this week too, Mr Alnbury says I have to get it signed”.

Of course, it isn’t difficult to find people to react as you want them to in the Vox Pops because firstly, you’re asking people with time to spare on a weekday in Covent Garden (i.e. no job, daddy pays for everything) and secondly, you selected the most hideously over painted doll that people originally mistake your subject for a Geisha who had a terrible accident.

No set, no talent and no particular premise make Snog Marry Avoid an exercise in either switching off your brain after a terrible experience in order to avoid PTSD, or an exercise in brain chewing-gum for insomniacs.  If you have a camcorder from 1987, maybe you could donate time to the Beeb and make this show for them, saving money to allow them to make something better in future.

No related posts.

It’s for this exact reason that I wanted to change things on my iPhone, because I couldn’t use Skype on anything but a WiFi signal, which is a real pain.  The 3G network definitely has enough bandwidth, as 3 demonstrates with it’s working Skype.  Another issue is the inability to run Skype “in the background” so that it can be running waiting for calls whilst running other things on my iPhone.  A conventional iPhone will switch Skype off everytime you use another app.

So, naturally I ‘Jailbroke’ my iPhone, and I can now do the following cool things:

• I have terminal access to the OS
• I have a copy of Doom on my iPhone
• I can spoof any app into considering the 3G signal to be a WiFi signal
• Each page of apps now holds 20 icons, not 16. (4×5 not 4×4)  and the dock holds 5 icons not 4 (which is ideal, Phone, Text,Email,Browser,iPod)

So yeah, I can do loads of cool stuff, and I’ve tricked Skype into thinking that it always has a WiFi signal, which is all good.  But there’s a downside to all of this:

With the newly Jailbroken iPhone comes the opportunity to download a load of different packages, and some of them include some pretty battery draining features.  With the Linux packages OpenSSL and OpenSSH installed, the phone behaves like a small server allowing me to login to it, and access files within the file system.

Problem with this is that the phone’s standby cycle, normally lasting around a good couple of days, now lasts no more than one.

I’m working on deactivating the server bits I don’t need except when I need them.  But for now, my iPhone is out of jail, but the activity of being out of the slammer is tiring the poor little phone out!

I’m working on it.

Related posts:

1. Confessions of a Mac Fanboy So, as many of you will know, I’m a pretty...

I love my Macs, because they make my job so much easier in many ways, and my phone for much the same reason, but this following is my list of things not to like about Apple, that most Mac Addicts will avoid mentioning, or sometimes even knowing about.

1. DRM

With the iPod came the M4P audio format – the format that will famously only work on your own iPod and copy of iTunes.  Digital Rights Management had been attempted before, and existed already, but Apple were the first to properly put it into place.  By combining the desirable design and usability of the iPod with a draconian DRM system, Apple not only annoyed a whole future of iPod users, but they cemented into place the idea that DRM was a good and practicable idea, making it acceptable for others to try, as with the famous Sony ‘Rootkit’ issue, where Sony effectively hacked peoples systems in the name of copyright protection.  To this day, iTunes Store working on MP4 is the single most annoying thing Apple ever did.

2. It’s Linux, it’s fine!

Apples Operating Systems, OS1 to OS9 were based on their own programming structure, but for OSX (ten) they switched to a UNIX or Linux like environment in order to make their OS easily adapted to the new wave of processors that were on their way.  When Apple switched to using Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips in 2006, they were well prepared, and everything was running on the most commercially viable desktop version of Linux (well Linux-ish).

At this point, they started boasting.  300,000 viruses on the PC, zero on Mac; MacOSX is the most secure; this kind of thing.  My point being twofold here:  1.  When you based your operating system on the work of others that they offered freely, you don’t then boast in such a smart arsey manner about it.  Millions of people were already using Linux.  2.  When your OS is pretty inherently secure, you don’t invite the world to try and break it.  MacOSX is the best demo of what is possible with Linux and other POSIX operating systems when it’s used in a desktop way, and to boast about the security of anything too much is a BAD idea, when this will catalyse people to find holes in it.  Which of course they did.  Apple’s biggest issue with MacOSX?  Stupid stuff like setting default consistent root passwords and the like.  The first MacOSX was full of holes, and yet Steve Jobs was over the moon with it.

Pride comes before a fall, so stop being so up you own about it all.

3. iPhone Elitism

You can buy a Blackberry and use it on any network you like, it might originally be locked, but it’s relatively cheap to unlock.  An unlocked iPhone from Apple costs around the same as mortgage.  When it was launched in America, it was on AT&T and it still is, when launched in the UK it was 02 and it still is.  To make the world’s most adaptable phone with an inherently developing software base that anyone can contribute software packages to (although I’ll get on to that in a moment!), you shouldn’t then ruin it by limiting it to one network, and refusing the freedom to choose who you do business with to customer is the very opposite of the adaptable genius technology that went into the iPhone in the first place.

Remember when Microsoft got into trouble for forcing Internet Explorer on people?  Now imagine that they had made Windows only capable of running IE, and refuse all other browsers, and you have a similar situation to having an iPhone that only works on one network.  At a good 500 a go for the original iPhone, it was ridiculous, and did Apple no good in my eyes.

4. iPhone Housebrick

When it was revealed that the iPhone could be unlocked by using some tools developed by a group of hackers, many people did this to allow them to use some of the new software that people were illicitly releasing and distributing underground or to allow them to use a different network.  Apple responded by releasing software that ‘bricked’ any iPhones that had been unlocked.

After people spent hundreds on their iPhones, Apple made them into decorative paperweights for anyone who’d tried to use them for functions that weren’t available yet.  That’s the worst bit about this.  In the main, Apple bricked phones that were using apps, because Apple hadn’t launched them yet.

In terms of another comparison like before.  This is like buying a bread maker that will stop working forever if you use anything but the approved brand of yeast.  Apple set up it’s iPhones to literally stop working permanently, which given they belonged to the people who had altered them, is a bit rich.  It’s abhorrent if I’m honest.

5. The “you’re not invited” app store

Having launched the App Store for iPhones, Apple put in place a list of rules for what the apps could do, but then also did some obviously questionable rejections of applications, including refusing Google Voice for not-entirely-clear reasons, and even more moronically, rejecting a dictionary for including definitions of some expletives.  One of the cited rejected words was ‘ass’.  Difficult to take Apple seriously after that.

6. I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC, and I’m a failed advertising executive

Now, I know that these adverts worked but the actual premise and idea of them was just annoying.  Encouraging a rivalry between two camps of users is not a good idea when you seek to convert people.  Not only did this ad campaign make Apple users seem like self-important cocks, it also served to make David Mitchell and Robert Webb, who starred in the UK version of the ads, seem like equally dispicable fools.

Worse than that it prompted the terrible response from Microsoft of the “I’m a PC you got a problem with that?” ads.  After these machoist rebukes by the Microsoft marketing lot, the market is divided into a stereotypical set of Guardian readers who wouldn’t say boo to a goose but would definitely enjoy making a youtube video edited on iMovie on their MAC if they did, and a set of blokey wankers who just love that Excel keeps asking if they want to restore a backup of last time it crashed.  It’s a challenge innit?  Fight that computer!

I’m now stuck in the middle.  I buy Mac hardware because it’s good, and it works really quite well.  Sure it’s expensive, but it also lasts a good while, so the cost is similar over time.  I use MacOS because it’s nicely written and runs all the software I use for my job, I also triple boot my machines to also run Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux so as to be able to test web products and software on all platforms.

I have an iPhone, but, for the reasons detailed above, it’s Jailbroken, I own it outright (it’s not a contract phone) and I operate it on two networks using almost entirely software from open sources.  I run skype with wreckess abandon, and have even installed my own command line utilities and stuff.

Yes, I’m a mac fanboy, but my mac runs everything, and it’s a bastardised mash of all the best bits I could find of Apple, Microsoft and everything else.

I am the bastard child of a Mac Fanboy.

Related posts:

1. Downside of Jailbroken iPhones As is well documented, there are a number of things...
2. Unexpected webcam sexytime Everyone knows to try to avoid hackers, to take care...

Naturally, it’s not straightforward!

I’m going to cover some of the major blog engines and why I would or wouldn’t use them.

B2Evolution

B2Evolution is actually a pretty good engine, which can be bent round to do a lot more than Wordpress without much problem, certainly with less bother than Wordpress.  In addition to this it has some much more advanced and detailed SEO settings and some really nice settings for the more expert user.  The only reason I didn’t use B2Evolution for this blog was because Wordpress simply has more stuff out there on the web and a much larger repository of plugins.

Nucleus

Put simply as I can, I don’t use nucleus because it lacks the community support, it has a fairly small amount of plugins, the SEO isn’t all that, and the demo link on their website leads to a page that says “This site is gone forever due to abuse”.  I mean, you’d just delete the link wouldn’t you??

Wordpress

Wordpress is by far the most full featured blog in the world simply because of it’s thousands of plugins.  It’s most supported, most experimented with, and most easy to install (about 4 or 5 steps) and it’s pretty simple to make a theme for it.  Recent additions of a query system to only list some posts, and it’s rather good-ness with SEO make Wordpress a bit of a winner each time.  The back end is nice, the front end can be anything you want, and it runs on nearly any system.

Only thing with Wordpress is that it’s basically for the more serious blogger.  It’s got settings that your average livejournaler wouldn’t need, and with this in mind, I’m also recommending:

Chyrp

Chyrp is an awesome little program that has only just really surfaced.  Taking the easy install elements and SEO functionality of Wordpress and the different post types of Tumblr, making it a perfect solution for a quick-setup self hosted blog for fairly casual reasons.  If you want a blog where you just write stuff, and share stuff, then this is pretty much the best solution I’ve seen.  It has a simple theme system and a growing number of straightforward plugins.

Related posts:

1. Which Blog? – Hosted When this site was offline for a few weeks, I...
2. Has Wordpress Killed Your Spider? aordpress is a piece of software that I obviously barely...

If you haven’t decided whether to used hosted or self hosted read: Bloginners: What do I need

If you want to use a hosted blog, then read: Which Blog? – Self Hosted

The Hosted Ones

If you only want a blog for writing general musings on the day, or about one subject; if you’re looking to share some info or have an outlet on the world for your mind then by all means use a hosted account on one of the blogging platforms.  I’ve had a look at the following:

LiveJournal

Oh god, why would you bother?  LiveJournal is horrible to look at, fairly unintuitive to use and relatively uncustomisable in comparison to some others.  Bear in mind that even if you love using LiveJournal, they are horrible to read, properly unpleasant, and this will mean that only your friends will bother.  Behind your back your friends are conversing about how they hate looking at your blog.

In addition to this, the pages aren’t particularly great for search engine friendliness, so don’t look forward to dominating the rankings with a LiveJournal.  As this link proves, it ain’t great: Google search for Questionable Content Blog.  The first result is the RLBlog, a blog hosted by Wordpress on the same domain, but actually a bit of an extension of the original webcomic.  Admittedly this is partly down to the way that the guy doesn’t call it a ‘blog’, but a Google for ‘XKCD Blog’ will find his, and he doesn’t refer to it as a blog either.

Blogger

When it started, Blogger was the most straightforward of straight and forward things, with a few simple settings and limited library of templates which were suitably bland so as to not affect your readers too much.  Since it’s acquisition by Google, Blogger has developed some really nice features.  Your friends who use GoogleMail/Calendar/Analytics, Picasa, Blogger, Feedburner or any others of the 9,576,034 applications Google peddles to the public, can log in to your blog and be identified without any bother using their Google ID.  Other pluses include built-in support for Google Adsense (if you fancy violating your readership for some ad cash) and instant (Yes instant) addition to Google’s search results upon publication.  The absolute quickest way to get a blog post onto search results, is to use Blogger.

Wordpress.com

The hosted arm of Wordpress, Wordpress.com is WP’s answer to online hosted blogging, and allows you an account from which to run any number of blogs.  I’ve used it a bit a while back after I gave up using blogger (shortly before it was nucleated by Google), and it’s reasonably good.  It’s almost exactly like using Wordpress, but includes some community features, and altering the appearance of you blog beyond one of the templates provided costs money, actually cash money, really! It’s this that makes me no use Wordpress.com at all.

Tumblr

Tumblr is to blogging what Twitter is to spouting sentences no one cares about.  Tumblr has a few massive plusses to me.  It’s hugely simple; it’s login screen is also it’s signup screen so if you want an account or already have one the process is the same, type in an email address, blog name and a password and go.  That’s it.  Also, you can completely customise it, writing your own HTML and CSS if you want to.

By far the best thing about tumblr is it’s simplicity, you just choose what you’re posting, and then post it.  You can choose types of post from link/text/photo/video/IM and each has a custom screen for inputting the details.  Videos can be from YouTube/Vimeo or uploaded and photos can also be linked in from elsewhere.  It’s literally for just spewing stuff you like.  You can follow other tumblrs, and if you include a question mark in your post, it’ll give you the option of having comments, so it’s all a bit simple.  You can also add custom slugs to your URL for searchability if you like that kind of thing.

The best

Of the hosted options, the best (assuming that you want a simple blog, for outletting your thoughts on to the unsuspecting web) is Tumblr, which makes everything simpler than remembering to breathe.  A close second, and ideal for if you want to use a bit more organisation in your blog, is Blogger.  A remarkable number of popular single topic blogs are on Blogger.

Related posts:

1. Which Blog – Self Hosted So you’ve decided on a self hosted blog?  You have...
2. Has Wordpress Killed Your Spider? aordpress is a piece of software that I obviously barely...

They could not always last.

And though the present I regret,

I’m grateful for the past.

Great little quote by William Congreve, who is one of these figures, like John Ruskin who seems nice, but abused those around him endlessly.  Regardless though, great quote, and applies with equal wisdom to a million life situations.  Remember it.

While you’re at it, Congreve was the one who said the Scorned women ragey quote that I bet you get wrong, so this is it:

“Heaven hath no rage,

Like a love to hatred turned.

Nor hell a fury,

Like a woman scorned”

Awesome isn’t it, the womanising old git.

No related posts.

The thing that has caught me (again) at the moment, is needing ID for various things to do with having moved house.  I have no passport, and obviously it would take a long time to get one (I’ve started the process, fear not, but it will take some time to  say the least).  I’m medically not allowed to drive, so the Provisional Driver’s Licence I have cannot even be updated to have a correct address on it.  I’m not an employee of a government agency or anything like that, and so I’m entirely devoid of ID that most places will take.  I have an out of date Driver’s Licence and a Student Card with 1 month left to live, and no one takes it anyway.

In my circumstances, an official government-issued ID card would be useful, not to carry everywhere, and not to be forced to present to a police officer or anything, but to take to the bank when I need to, and to the doctors when I need.  A card with similar security to a driver’s licence and my photo, address and date of birth for about £25 would be ideal (that’s what my drivers learner thing cost, roughly, in 1998).

Anyone else think this could be useful for people who can’t drive for whatever reason?

Related posts:

1. The ID vicious circle The ID vicious circle I have a very out...

What the holy parental enforced career Batman?  Could it be that the typically American Beauty pageant that tragically spread to US children in the 80’s and 90’s has now spread to the UK?  Well, yes Robin, it only fucking has, and at the risk of sounding like someone ranting on the Daily Mail comments board, it’s absolutely to even hear of, just as it is in the US.

A few years back, whilst heading out on to the first few works of my degree, I did a poster piece called “Little Miss America” which was a presentation of over 6,000 pictures of over made up, plasticised children, in rows of 200, tinted so that at a distance it’s a stars and stripes and close us it’s disgusting display of some examples of thing that adults will inflict upon children in the name of making them be what they wanted to be.  At the time I made “Little Miss America” it struck me how these events aren’t inherently abhorrent, but parents who are attracted to pressure their children into winning them are not-even-borderline abusive.

The link I’ve posted here is to the BBC programme “Baby Beauty Queens” which is 57 minutes of what should be jaw-droppingly horrific television.  As we watch born-again christian mother telling of nine-year-old (and pretentiously named) Maddison that she needn’t be scared off a self tan “Don’t be silly” she says, presented with her youngest child on the edge of tears, it’s hard to stop yourself wondering whether Social Services will have enough evidence to intervene after this programme has aired.

Only a few seconds later, we meet Tyler, the offspring of a mother who is so stupid it’s amazing she remembers to breathe telling us of how she proudly took her child to have cosmetic surgery age 6, and I find myself yelling at the screen.  These kids aren’t your typical 7 – 9 year olds who sometimes play with some make-up they found at home, they’re kids who are scolded by their parents if their make-up isn’t perfect.  Tyler in particular explains to camera how she has glasses but will be ‘told off’ if she wears them as opposed to her contact lenses.

Later in the show, the viewer is shown some children who choose to do the show, and aren’t pressured, and whilst I still find this a bit distasteful, it’s far better than forcing your child into it.

“Whatever you feel inside, if you are looking good on the outside, you are putting a brave face on to the world, and I think it’s important that you be the best you can be” says Tyler’s breathtakingly stupid bitch of a mother.

“I didn’t want to have an ugly child”…

I’m frankly lost for any more words to express my disgust at the pushy parents on these programmes.  Kids are shown being disciplined and forced to practice frankly pointless dance routines followed by a final preparation ceremony during which parents expose their children to intensely hot curling tongs, huge amounts of make-up and chemicals to alter the kids.  “She looks like a little doll” says one proud moron, and yet still one mother is amazed at the sheer amount of cosmetic alteration.  It takes the unemployed penniless mum who lives in a council estate to point out that many of the kids are exploited.

Quite frankly, this is a terrible reflection on the UK, that we have this event occurring now, and my congratulations to the mother who did nothing but borrow a room in the local pub to allow her daughter to practice, and bought her a dress from the local charity shop (home altered to fit).

To the mothers whose daughters looked like barbie, and had cosmetic surgery, 4 hours of make up ritual and a 8 week dance tuition programme; I sincerely hope that the authorities have enough material from the BBC documentary to offer your mistreated and abused offspring the opportunity to a better life without you idiotic selves.  You really are the slime of the Earth, and if you wish to offer your kids the opportunity to do “whatever [they] want to” then maybe you should take a sharpened tiara to your jugular.

I’m just watching the winner’s ceremony now, and am delighted to see that none of the barbie-dolls and in fact went to an 11-year-old with absolutely no make-up and a really nice dress.  In your face, senseless morons!

Related posts:

1. American Healthcare – A brief and uninterested overview As we all know – probably – the US is...
2. It’s easy to frown… …on all of the people around who have kids they...

The ID vicious circle

I have a very out of date set of ID.  It stems from a few issues.  I have a preliminary driver’s licence (that’s a learners licence to non-UK readers).  I am not actually entitled to drive, and so I can’t have a full valid driver’s licence even if I were Ayrton Senna.  Medically, I’m officially unfit to drive and that’s that.  This means that the learners licence I have has the address on it that I lived at when I was 17.  The ID is valid and serves it’s purpose of convincing the odd alcohol vendor that I’m me and old, but the address is a good 9 years out of date, and I legally cannot be granted another or have it swapped for one with an up to date address.

When I moved into my new place a few years ago, I changed my address with my bank.  I phoned them up and quoted my security password and so on, and they started sending my mail elsewhere.  Brilliant.  While I was living there, everyone started to soil themselves that someone may steal their identities and so the bank started requiring proof of a new address, which given that only they ever mail me, is kinda difficult so, while I was a student, I skipped updating a couple of addresses, and opted for them to send my statements by email instead.

Now, I live in Swansea, with some friends.  Ironically the home of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency too, they could update my licence but won’t.  I tried to open a bank account.  I need a form of ID and a letterhead from a bank to show my address.  I can’t do that, because the old bank won’t change my details without a signed Affadavit from the pope.  So I remain ID less.

I’m also, whilst looking for a job, applying for the government benefit that is appropriate to that.  Now don’t be stupid, I really am looking for a job, and I’ve paid about 15,000 pounds of tax since I was 18 (I’m 26 now), so it doesn’t take the piss to claim a bit of help for a few short weeks.  I need either a drivers licence with up to date address, or some acceptable ID and a letterhead from a trustworthy institution to show my address.  I have none of this crap.  My birth certificate is a piece of beige paper, typewritten and my passport is expired and disposed of.  My Driver’s Licence we’ve covered and I am staying with friends, so I have no bills in my name.

I need an address for ID and I need ID for an address.  Worse than that, I need BOTH for a benefits claim and in order to get any new form of government ID, I need lots of money as they’re not in the habit of doing anything at a reasonable price.

Anyone got any clue what I do next?

Related posts:

1. Shock! Horror! I’m in favour of ID cards…sorta. Ok, so I’m not in favour of enforced ID cards,...