A while ago I went on a low-carbohydrate diet to try and lose some weight. And although the diet itself was borderline impossible to maintain, I did find that my skin cleared up, I stopped farting all the time, my moods radically stabilised and I felt much more energised and up for stuff. Now I’ve been reading about Candida and I’m thinking, “Hmm well that all sounds remarkably familiar…” I should go to the doctors really…
I’m not one for the constant tracking of page impressions, but I do check my stats every couple of days to find out if anyone’s crouched behind an Ice Rink whispering about me behind my back. Once you reach my level of web celebrity you have to be careful about these things. You wouldn’t understand, I’m sure. Anyway, because of a recent upgrade in the kind of reporting facilities I have, I now know the search terms that people are using to come to my site. Now of course everyone else has had this ability for years. I used to have it too. Sigh – those heady days of youth… I’ll never get them back now…
I’m commenting on this recently regained ability because I keep getting referrals from people who search for Workshy Fop. Turns out I’m the third most visible fop on the planet according to Google. What an honour. Clearly this too is an honour that most of you have little chance of even beginning to aspire to. But if you want to see if you even rate, might I suggest submitting your picture to Am I a Workshy Fop or Not?
Now I’ve started using ‘titles’ to my weblog posts, but if you’re not reading the site through some kind of RSS feed you won’t know what any of them are. I’m not keen on breaking up the flow of my posts on the main site though, so let me spell it out for you just this once… The title of this post is If the BBC can’t get it right…
Now the BBC runs a number of mailing lists. Once I signed up for one of them when I was trying to keep up with one very specific aspect of what they were doing. The list I signed up to was called ‘Communicate’. I’d like to provide a link to the page in question, but I can’t find it on the site anymore. Anyway, after a while I decided to unsubscribe and so followed the link on their site to this page. I filled in my information and got this reply:
Thank you for requesting the Communicate Newsletter. You will receive 3 information emails, and only need reply to ‘Confirm Subscribe’ to begin your subscription.
1. Majordomo Results
(There is no need to reply to this email – it is just to advise you that your email address has been used to subscribe with us)
2.Confirm Subscribe
(You MUST reply to this message by simply clicking the ‘Reply’ & then ‘Send’ buttons in your email program)
3.Welcome to Communicate
(This message is to welcome you to the Newsletter, please retain it for your future reference)
You’ll notice – of course – that this is welcoming me to the newsletter. Humph I thought. Maybe they’ve got the copy wrong. But no. I continued to receive the newsletter. So I followed the other instructions relating to signing off the list. Let me spell this stuff out:
“If you wish to unsubscribe from this newsletter or have received it in error, please click here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/communicate/newsletter/news_unsubscribe.html or send a blank email to majordomo@lists.bbc.co.uk stating ‘Unsubscribe Communicate’ in the subject line (keep the rest of the e-mail blank).”
Ok, well I tried the first one, so I thought I’d try the second one. Only to be sent (immediately) a reply that went like this…
“This message shows the result of status of your request to subscribe, unsubscribe, or alter your subscription to one of the BBC’s mailing lists.
**** No valid commands found.
**** Commands must be in message BODY, not in HEADER.
Hmm. Interesting. So that information was just wrong then? Note at no point around here is there any e-mail address that I could use to contact anyone directly if I actually can’t get the damn thing to work. And the BBC isn’t a small organisation. There must be 40,000 or more people working for them at any one time. It’s not beyond the bounds of reason that I might never figure out who to contact… Anyway – I’m fairly sure I’ve tried this other approach as well – with the commands in the ‘proper’ place, and that it didn’t work either. But I’ll try. Again.
If you’ve got something to smack your gob with, keep it handy. You’re going to need it in a moment. When beautiful sword-fighting deviant geek goddess Anno Mitchell showed it to me, I wasn’t prepared. My gob was left empty and unsmacked for several agonising seconds. You’re going to want to be prepared for this. But before we start, remember these simple instructions – the ‘euh’ button will stop the wonderful thing happening and make everything good and normal again. The keys you are looking for are on your number pad: “8” and “2”. Are you ready? Can you contain your excitement? Then experience the Awesome Ungodly Full Screen Explorer-Based Cross-Platform Pong Extravaganza. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Damn it. We’ve all been so good – working hard all week, trying to make a meagre crust to take home to our children, animals and additional dependants (adopted and virtual). I think we deserve to cut loose a little – don’t you? Punk style? So here’s my guide to ways to get completely over-excited about the dumb work week’s ending in fire and sparkly bits. Viva Las Weekend!
If you liked Spider-Man, you’ll love…. The Amazing George W.: “My father’s downfall is my fault… Now I know… With Power comes Responsibilitude…”
My XCOM co-panellee Ben Hammersley has finally done something useful with his time, other than write huge tomes on RSS, co-create Warchalking, figure out when his dogs were born and wear that bizarre murderer-style hat. He’s written a good introduction to Newsreaders for the Guardian. It’s a fluff piece obviously, but it’s nice good fluff because we all agree with it. Like candy floss. If you’re interested in subscribing to plasticbag.org you may be looking for that foul little orange button with ‘XML’ written on it. But you won’t find it, because it’s bloody horrible looking. Instead you can find the feed here.
I can’t be the only person who’s in awe of how good plasticbag.org is. Each and every day that Tom fellow (what a looker!) writes extraordinary – self-promotingly – witty garbage about all many of things that I don’t give a damn about. That’s got to be seriously hard work, right? I mean, talent like that doesn’t just fall drunk out of trees, now does it? Well here’s your chance to prove how common and banal a skill weblogging really is! I’m calling this one “We are all plasticbag.org” – write a post in the style (if there is one) of this here site. Make it funny, crappy, elegant, pointless, artful, wondrous – awe-inspiring even. Best ones get posted on this here hallowed Indian burial ground…
Ok. Sex. I mean – why? I mean, let’s be honest – It’s a bit shit isn’t it. I mean it’s not like computers? It’s all unreliable and irritating. Ok maybe it’s like computers running Windows… People only pretend to like it anyway so they can fit in. It’s like Eastenders. No one wants to watch it, but if they don’t, how the hell are they going to have anything to talk about at dinner parties? Sex is exactly the same. And I don’t watch Eastenders. PS. Anyone who decides to burst my bubble on this one is going to get a smack…
Barely inspired by this very boring looking article which I couldn’t be bothered to read, I’ve spent a good twenty minutes trying to uncover The Ten Secrets of a Successful Website – a much much less boring microsite bashed together by Jason Kottke when he was doing cool creative things with 0sil8.com rather than being godfather of weblogdom. Here’s a particularly choice quote:
“When dealing with a web site, especially a corporate web site, branding is the most important thing. Therefore, the logo has to be the most visible element on the site. That means it has to be on every page, preferably in the upper lefthand corner of the page. the logo must also be large… Set your screen to 640×480 resolution and make sure the logo takes up a quarter of your browser window. Of course, this means that the content will be pushed down the page a little. Don’t worry, content isn’t that important and people will find it if they really want to. And again, if you can animate or make your logo 3D, that will increase its impact even more.”
And while I was at 0sil8.com I thought I’d better mention some other classic Kottke that you young folks were probably too busy sniffing glue and having underage sex to have seen the first time around: