Every year, I take part in NaBloPoMo the Judoon mating festival where people blog every day in November. I ended November 2019 with more blog posts than I knew what to do with, so I tried blogging every day in January. And then, well, February is only a short month, isn't it? If all has gone to plan, you're reading this at the end of 2020 and this is my 366th blog post! Fucking leap years, eh? WHY!?!? They say every day is a school-day. I try to blog about the new things I've learned, or…
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A curio from the archives. Waaaaaay back in 2003, I was working at Vodafone on their graduate training scheme. One of their fancy new ideas was a crowd-sourced employee suggestion box for new business proposals. As an eager young grad I submitted dozens of ideas. Most of them were crap. But, as I looked back over them, this one struck me as being a lot less crap than others. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentLooking through some *very* old documents.Discovered that I pitched the idea of…
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Just me scratching my own itch. I want to create an RSS feed of all the blog posts which I'd published on this day in the past. For example, if today is 21st of November 2016 then this plugin will show blog posts written on 2015-11-21 2014-11-21 2013-11-21 And so on. You can view a demo at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/on_this_day Code The code is pretty simple. The WordPress API is fairly easy to get on with. /* Plugin Name: OnThisDay Description: RSS feed of posts which occurred on…
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In the good ol' days of blogging, when your blogpost was mentioned on another site, you would receive a "pingback". A sort of meta-comment you could display which said "So-and-so's blog has linked here." It enabled you to see who was driving traffic to you, if a "big name" had noticed you, and gave your readers a sense of where the conversation was continuing. Of course, it occaisionally got abused by spammers, but it was still fairly nifty. Last week my blogpost on Fake BBM Reviews got…
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It's only a silly number - and not a very accurate one - but it makes me happy. Thank you for reading - it has truly been my pleasure to write for you. …
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(Hopefully the last naval gazing post of the year...) I asked if using a WordPress theme to emulate the Svbtle theme was unethical. The results were mixed - you can see some of the discussion on HackerNews and AppDotNet. Broadly speaking, people fell into four categories. People who had never heard of Svbtle and didn't see a problem with using a similar theme. People who had heard of Svbtle and didn't like the ethos behind the platform, so didn't like the theme. People who were …
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For the last few months, I've been using the WordPress theme wp-svbtle. Even with my limited design sense, I think it looks rather spiffy. Recently though, I've had a few people on HackerNews and Twitter criticising me of "ripping off" Svbtle and accusing me of trying to defraud readers into thinking I was part of the Svbtle network. While nothing could be further from the truth, I think an explanation is in order. For those who don't know, Svbtle.com is a "curated collection of great…
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Well. That was an intense NaBloPoMo! I published a blog post every day in November - as I have for the last few years - but this was unlike anything that went before. I had over 50,000 viewers in a single day due to one of my posts, got hit by reddit and HackerNews, and even got asked to do some paid blogging! I started this month hoping to average 1,000 page views per day. This was so I could hit the (pretty arbitrary) milestone of half a million page views. This is what my November…
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The fifth anniversary of my blog went by without me noticing. I don't know if I'm a narcissist, but I quite often find myself re-reading old entries. Sometimes it's because I've Googled for the solution to a problem, only to find I helpfully blogged about it yonks ago - other times I'll read an article and think "Hmmm, I wrote on that subject a while ago," and go off to find what I used to think. With over 560 entries - ranging from single images to thousand word screeds - it's tempting to…
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One of the things that jollies me along during NaBloPoMo (where I have to write a blog post every single day in November) is seeing that people are reading my blog. I like watching the visitor counter tick gently upwards. I also love to see people discussing, arguing, and commenting on the posts I write. When I started this month, I looked at the blog's statistics and decided I wanted to get 30,000 views in the month of November. I normally average 600 views per day. So, how to get that up…
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This is a sponsored post from ebuzzing I've been pleasantly surprised by ebuzzing. They're part of the Wikio Group, who are focussed on getting bloggers to post about about brands that they like - and get paid for it. Despite running a backwater blog on obscure mobile phone related nonsense, I often get emailed by companies wanting to promote themselves here. Sometimes they offer review goods to keep, sometimes cash, sometime they don't want anyone to know they're…
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This has been a really tough NaBloPoMo for me. Work has been frantic - meaning that my lunchtime blogging has been restricted to a quick bit of copy editing. I've also had some wonderful new toys to play with - which has distracted my attention. But the biggest problem? My Android phone. Don't get me wrong, I love Android - but for typing, it's nowhere nearly as good as my BlackBerry was. I spend a lot of my time on trains, so I'm used to being able to bash out a fairly lengthy post or…
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