Archive for October, 2007

because he must have stolen the stars from heaven to put them in your eyes…

bleh! what a corny pickup line! I actually know someone that used this successfully (….eventually):-/

The King Speaks is having his first contest, it’s all about pickup lines and the best one gets 20 dollars. (Ok it’s not a huge amount like the 1800 dollars that gadgettastic is offering but it’s an easy contest to enter and it’s a nice blog).

I can’t remember ever using a pickup line! My partner and I got together when I asked if I could kiss her (she said yes thankfully!) so I’ll go with this instead, a favourite of English northerners…

Get your coat luv, you’ve pulled

luv: (n) term of endearment used by the people in north England
pulled: (v) the act of successfully attracting a sexual partner

You can enter yourself by submitting at least 1 and a maximum of 3 pickup lines, write a post about your entry and send an email to The King letting him know that you’ve entered. In return, you get a backlink from his up and coming blog and the chance to be twenny bucks richer!

Check out his blog, The King Speaks, for the entry rules and contact details

Popularity: 2% [?]

I saw a post over at Pelf-ism..about her 5 meme, it looks quite interesting and she quotes at the end, “Seriously, I think tags that are sent my way will most probably end with me. I don’t know how you will react to being tagged, so yeah, if you feel like sharing your “five” with me (and other people), let me know (by sending me a trackback)!”

I don’t really know enough people to tag with this so I’ll add my own list to the ‘orphan 5 meme’!

5 things found in my room (I’m at work now so I’ll use here)

• Filing Cabinet
• Computers!
• Rolodex
• Screwed up Macdonald sausage and egg McMuffin wrapper
• 1 Nike trainer

5 things I’ve always wanted to do

• Skydive
• Sing well
• Experience zero-G
• Take the controls of a helicopter
• Meet Tony Blair

5 things found in my bag

• A book called “Wireless Hacking Exposed”
• A bank statement - yey! I’ve been looking for this!
• A USB to MiniUSB cable
• A pen that never works - why do I keep it in there?
• A bunch of receipts that I haven’t put into expenses yet

5 things in my wallet

• Drivers license
• A book of 1st class stamps
• A one dollar bill with a wheresgeorge url on it
• A five Euro note
• Harrods loyalty card

5 things I’m currently in to

• Making Wordpress plugins
• My HTC x7500
• Reading sci-fi ebooks
• Writing a program for windows mobile 6
• Learning to speak Cantonese

This is where I’m supposed to tag 5 people but I just can’t bring myself to do it! what if they don’t do it? what if they ignore it? oh no! the fear, the trepidation…. the easy get out clause - I don’t know enough people that do tags so I’ll publish this one and pretend I didn’t know.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I have seen people playing photohunt games and it looks like fun so, with the help of Vegan Momma and Lalla-Mira I can announce a little photoshow game. I thought of taking pictures of things that were within 100 meters of your home. Here are mine…

10 meters away

20 meters away

50 meters away

100 meters away

Here’s how to play:

1. Take 4 photos within 100 meters of where you live, they can be of anything so long as it’s within 100 meters of your front door.
2. Add your name to this list with a link to your 100 meters post and display it on your blog
3. Tag two or more of your friends to participate and get them to do the same.

here’s the list at the start:

Andy Bailey - 100 meters (only me!!)

and here’s my tags

Lalla-Mira of Lalla-Mira.com
Vegan Momma of VeganMomma.com
Pelf of Pelf-ism is contagious

do we need a deadline? let’s see if more people do it this week….

Popularity: 4% [?]

I started this blog 6 weeks ago even though I had a different blog for over 3 years before that and a few others that were tiny adsense nets, I never read so many other blogs until now, it feels like new blogs that are coming up or are just a few months old are different to the ones that were around last year and the year before.

The people writing them and the reason they’re writing them seem different, a little more real life perhaps. A bit more orientated towards nice people in a nice community willing to help others, welcoming strangers to their tight knit virtual space. A virtual space that could span thousands of miles across the globe in milliseconds, the buzz of a lively conversation spread over different servers just a ’submit’ button away.

I feel lucky that I have wandered into this community where it’s a lot less “listen to what I have to say, click my adsense but don’t steal my PR!” and a lot more “tell me what you think about this and oh, go visit these nice people”

Take for instance, Sharon of The Diva Network who was one of the first regular visitors here when I started, she followed the MyBlogLogDogg back from her site to here and comes back a few times a week to catch up, she even helps out by answering peoples questions in the comments. I see her regularly on lots of blogs, always taking the time to help or give an insight to someones post. She was one of the first to help me test CommentLuv along with Miss Mira from lalla-mira.com who seems to be able to blog in 3 different languages!. Then SmocknMamma who likes to bake and make quilts helped out with a suggestion.

There’s Chessnoid and his TotalNoid blog, his informative site can have anything on there, the stock market, UFC, MMA, Movie reviews, SEO, Technorati and more. He seems to be part of the same community too, his readers and commenters have popped up here, I’ve seen them on other blogs that had the same ‘feel’ to them and I’ve seen others too…

I’ve seen Pelf and her visitors to her blog about breast cancer awareness and environmentalism among other things, her vistors led me to other blogs where there was another crossover with a like minded bunch of people, links in comments led me to people like Dana Wallert who wants to be a twenty something Stumbleupon queen, she regularly writes informative posts on sites like Stumbleupon and Sphinn. Amongst her commenters are people like Andy Beard who writes a niche marketing and affiliate tips blog (see his post about getting penalized by google), some of her top commentators are again, the same type of people. Chessnoid is there, as well as YC who appears all over the place! he writes about internet marketing and isn’t afraid of the big bad google!.

Brown Baron is a name I keep seeing mentioned here too, he writes about blog networking and social networking, Vegan Momma who makes natural beauty products who made a very nice write up of the CommentLuv plugin.

Bobby Revellian and his lively network of commenters on his blog about ethical commenting and great tips for other bloggers, again, many of his commenters appear on the other blogs above and more! each successive comment click takes me to another part of this ever expanding web of commentluv’ers, link luv’ers, anchorluv givers and such.

And AntiBarbie who has some great short story posts, see how many people comment there! some of those led me to The Passionate Ailurophile who’s rants made me smile at how she writes just like she speaks (I imagine) . hehe, stuph! - love that word now.

you know.. I could go on all day listing names of people and blogs that have made me think that blogging has a different feel to it now.

I don’t know about you but I want to meet the person that changed blogging and shake their hand. Before, in the old days of my elottery orientated blog I would sometimes feel like writing a new post was akin to a doing a chore (albeit a pleasant one like sweeping a big floorspace).

Because of the travel I have to do for work and the (more than) occasional 60 hour week I don’t get much ‘free’ time and used to resent giving some of it up to write another lottery related post on my old blog even though it got up to PR5 and was well known among other elottery people but now it’s much more different! I can find time between projects or slip in a session on google reader at work and wherever I am in the world, whatever I am doing, there is always that same community feeling when I go-a-browsing and comment clicking between these peoples blogs. Writing a new post and responding to someone else’s post have the same feeling for me now, a similar feeling to belonging to something bigger than me.

It makes me feel good, it makes me want to create.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’ve started the update journey on CommentLuv and it can now parse almost any URL I throw at it!

I’ve also updated the findfeed function so it can parse a users page for a feed link in the <head> section of their page and that’s working much better now.

I am considering adding a new bit that will try and manually find a last post from parsing the source of the users page and looking for something like <div class=”post” or <div class=”entry to grab the last title and link, I’m not sure if it’s worth it though because for long loading pages, it could add too many extra seconds on the function which isn’t the best thing to do unless it happens a lot.

I have visited a few blogs that are using CommentLuv and copied all the URL’s of the users that didn’t have their last blog shown and tried it on the new version running here and it got every single one except for the rare occasion of someone having an extra bit on the end of their feedburner url

like feedburner redirects that go to a url like
http://feeds.feedburner.com/lalla-mira/wvDM

for some reason, the internal fetch_rss function of Wordpress can’t parse a feed from feedburner that has an extra bit on the end of the username. I have tried using the Magpie functions instead of WP and that will do it but WP isn’t playing ball with these type of feedburner feed urls. A standard one will work just dandily, I’m waiting for someone to enlighten me on the WP forums.

I might take a break from it for a while and make a QR barcode widget!

If your last post didn’t show before on here then give it a go now and see if it can! (sorry Miss Mira, it still wont parse yours!)

You can download the latest version here: CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Wednesday lotto results are in and can you believe it? the bonus number was 49 . OMG. that’s the only number that wasn’t allocated to anyone ! HAh! such good drama I mean, what are the chances of that happening??? (well, 1 in 49 actually but it feels like a million to one chance to me!)

As per the rules, if the bonus number happens to be number 49 the the winner will be whoever matches the first drawn number.

Congratulations Footie Blog

You win the headphones from Vmoda. I’ll post a message on your blog to remind you to contact me for your prize. Please leave your choice of colour on this message and email me your name and address so I can get your prize out to you! Choose colour 1,2,3 or 4 from the picture below (1 is at the top)

Well, that was exciting! I really fancy doing some more contests, I may want to have a monthly competition that involves people who comment on this blog, once my next version of CommentLuv is finished, I’ll see if I can put some code together so that commenters get automatically allocated a unique number on each (approved) comment and then have a raffle at the end of the month..

what do you think?….

oh and thanks to everyone for taking part, it was nice to see so many people make an effort with their posts and being so generous with their blog real estate. Keep watching this space for more contests!

Popularity: 2% [?]

[edit] oops! draw is happening live at 10.37 pm … I thought it was at 8 for some reason.
the numbers on the toolbar on the right will update as soon as the internet has the results…

Ok, here are the randomly selected numbers from 1 to 48 for all the entrants of the FiddyP contest… first bunch get 2 numbers each, second bunch gets 1 number. Whoever matches their number with the bonus ball drawn tonight on the Wednesday UK National Lottery draw wins the prize!!

4,7 Contest Beat
24,5 The Link Bait
2,48 My Blog Contest
11,31 Lalla-Mira
10,46 Makanon
16,25 Local Girl
28,45 Contester
14,33 Blogcat
9,37 J-news
19,21 Angela
30,34 The King Speaks
12,47 Nate
22,42 Myblogcontests
15,41 adsensetrack
18,43 Johnathan Long
38,44 Mark
8,32 Anastasia
1,35 Footie Blog
17,26 Blogodise
20,39 TheDragonProject

these are entrants that didn’t match the minimum amount of words but I let in anyway because the post they made covered everything else..

3 ContestLR2
6 LauraWilliamsMusings
13 http://blog-contests.net
23 Thien Lee
27 Theprizeblog
36 MrPrizes
29 Nkhan
40 Internet Duct Tape

Good luck everyone!

Popularity: 4% [?]