nixsight

… Because I know that there are some of you out there.

I’ve been doing these Seven Days posts for a few weeks now, and I’m going to continue doing them, because as much as anything else they are good for maintaining some sort of writing discipline.

The question is, on posts – like the SD/TV one that just went live a few minutes ago – that tend to run to more than two or three shows – or books or movies – do you think it’d be easier to read or work better if I broke them up into a few shorter posts, seperated by show or theme – instead of the one long one?

It occurs to me that if you’re an avid watcher of “Bones”, or want to argue with me about “Buffy”, having to dredge through a bunch of stuff that you don’t care so much about might be annoying.

If anyone has any thoughts on this subject, or has any other ideas on what I can do to make the site easier for you to read – up to but not including getting someone other than me to write it! – as always please tell me all about it in the comments…!

“Macromyopia is society’s tendency to overestimate the short term results of a technology and to underestimate its long term results…”
John Barlow, Author and Songwriter.

I’m looking at you, Second Life. Also, as a follow on from that, the comments in this post at Snarkmarket had some insightful phrases that I hadn’t heard before.

“Men overestimate what they can accomplish in a year. But they underestimate what they can accomplish in five.”
Len

“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Paul Saffo

And while we’re on things I’ve heard today:

“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
The Magistrate’s Blog

Finally, on a blog (I forget which) talking about Obama’s recent, apparently terribly disappointing decision to be a politician, someone quoted the apparently old adage which perfectly sums up the salesman mentality seemingly present in every walk of life in the UK at the moment:

“No one else can give you as much as I promise you.”

(Well, it’s new to me!)

I offer you: YOUTUBE EMBEDDING! BWAHAHAHA! After all this time, I finally found a plugin that seems to work. It’s from here, by the way: http://www.paulbain.co.uk/simple-youtube-plugin-for-wordpress-easytube  /, and it’s a thing of beauty. Although the “newer” version on the website doesn’t actually work in my install.

If you know why the subject line is relevant, you deserve extra points, which you may redeem when the internet is over for a passel of naff all. You lucky people!

… Was one of the ads that Amazon put up on this website. Is it an unfortunate abbreviation, or Amazon editorialising on the cheerful mockney kitchen-monkey?

Whenever I feel down about my writing, all I need to do is look at the spam filter on this website’s comments. Among the encouragements found therein:

Good observation, your ideas are right on…
Leggo ed imparo sul vostro luogo. grazie! (Not sure what it means, but you can’t lose with lego.)
Thank you, I could not have sead it better my self….
Never be ashamed! There’s some who’ll hold it against you, but they’re not worth bothering with…
Your post is on target. Keep it up….
great blog, keep it comming….
Didn’t notice it before … quite clever….

I mean, okay, they are all fake people made of spam, but how sweet are they? They may not be real, but these guys love me!

Unlike my stupid backwoods redneck WordPress plugin tag generator. When things go wrong, which happens often with that particular plugin, it sees fit to announce that “something done went wrong.”

Story of my fucking life!

[edit] Test over… thanks to those of you who had a look… I am sticking with the normal design for a while, as I think it’s ace, but may make a more prominent, less navigation-intrusive space for the ads in a third column (more…)

I felt like maybe I should credit the good people whose plugins I’m using on WordPress, so I’ve done so.

Oh, right. Yeah. It’s here: Plugin love

Apologies to those of you who read the site pretty regularly, as you may, once again, have been confused to see that Google’s all powerful, “Do No Evil”, super-smart Adsense software, with it’s awesome interpreting power and generally spankiness, decided that the most appropriate websites to advertise, tailored as they are specifically to my website, were all either Christian propoganda sites, or dating places for young Muslim women in the UK.

Apologies also to those of you who are either young Muslim women in the UK hoping to hook up with a bright-eyed young Christian fella, or vice-versa, because I am frantically adding each one of those sorts of sites shown here to my Adsense “no fucking way do I wish to advertise these sites round these parts” filter. Which is a pain in the ass, but what are you going to do?
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Little bit more admin today…

You may have noticed (although hopefully not too easily, as I tried to integrate it into the design of the site as much as possible) that I’ve started including ads in the sidebar. If I can make it work in a non-intrusive way, I’m thinking of including a couple more, too.
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Here’s something I’ve already started doing, and want to mention.

In the interests of making full use of the interactivity of the web, I’ve tried to include useful links to related material (which should appear in bold) within my posts, when time allows.

However, I’m skint, so what I’ve also done, when possible, is when something I’ve mentioned is purchasable at Amazon, I’ve created a link to it there. If you use that link to buy the item, I get a bit of money.
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Okay, so the first comments are in, and it’s become apparent that the next thing on the agenda is CSS for them… because man they ugly.

Found out that we don’t have broadband at home until 08/03, but once that’s done, it’s time to start picking the bones of my old site, and working out what I want to strip out and put in here. By then I should have worked out some sort of flash-fiction discipline, too. Or else, how I’m going to rework the old stuff so that it looks like new flash-fiction!