Category: Uncategorized

On my web hosting package, I’ve got a stats program which lets me know what search terms people are using to find this website.

Some of them are fairly understandable. Some of them are just bizarre!

Here’s a selection:

• facebook uploader
• torchwood scripts (remember, I have no torchwood scripts…)
• extreme canoeing
• christian song lyrics
• changing a battery in a smoke detector open cover
• how are tv viewing figures calculated
• mains powered smoke alarm making beeping sound
• penicillin (what??? – as far as I know, I’ve never even mentioned penicillin!)
• first rule of robot club (I hope this was another fan of Spaced)
• obsessed with badgers (WHY would anyone be searching for this??? – worrying!)
• the worst things you can do in christianity? (I’m so glad that someone searching for that came to my website?! – not as an example, I hope!)
• i need a free will (nah, sorry, we don’t have free will mate…)

Some of those are just bizarre. Ah well, I’m glad the internet is its usual, random self…

The IT Crowd is back! Last Friday night, Alex came round for dinner and afterwards we all watched the first episode of the second series of “The IT Crowd”. It was absolutely fantastic – we laughed a lot during the episode! The second half was particularly good…

Anyway, if you liked the original series of the IT Crowd (or if you didn’t see it but are generally a fan of good comedy), check it out on Fridays at 9:30 on Channel 4.

DISCLAIMER: If the rest of the season turns out to be rubbish, then I wil be surprised…

Well, all my photos have now been transferred to Flickr — if you want to see them you have to visit my Flickr page.

I have to say, in comparison with Yahoo! Photos it’s much better… it’s a really well thought-out interface, with plenty of features.

The next step is to see about getting some kind of integration with Facebook… I’m not too bothered about integrating with WordPress because I can just post a link here whenever I upload photos.

I’ll update with more thoughts on Flickr when I’ve used it for a few days!

I’ve been having a bizarre problem with Apache recently. On the Fordham Church website, we use the MODx Content Management System. MODx comes with an Apache .htaccess file, which uses mod_rewrite to give you nice URLs. For example, instead of www.fordhamchurch.org.uk?id=9, you get www.fordhamchurch.org.uk/services.html.

This worked fine for ages, until recently: I wanted to add a wiki to the website in order to document it — how to update the website, how to update email addresses etc etc. Because this data was relatively sensitive (I wouldnt’ want anyone to log in and edit it), I wanted to add password protection in using Apache’s Basic Authentication.

So, I created the wiki in a subdirectory, and then added in password protection. This did not work. Long story short, I tried a whole bunch of stuff but nothing seemed to work. For some reason, when you have mod_rewrite on, Apache doesn’t like it when you password protect a subdirectory.

After searching around a bit, I came across this thread, which seemed to explain it a bit. Sure enough, I tried adding in an ErrorDocument 401 directive to the parent directory’s .htaccess file and it works fine.

I post this in the hope that it might help others struggling with the same issue!

I got another email today from the same guy I mentioned in a previous post. This time, however, the email is coming from a GMail address… he might have read my blog post and decided that displaying the actual website he’s trying to advertise is not a good idea?

Anyway, this is the email that I received, in full, if you get an email like it than be warned – it is probably Search Engine Optimisation (probably just internet spam in order to boost Google advertising revenue or something).

From: charles.leich@gmail.com
Subject: Interested in Purchasing Textlink Advertising

Hi ,
I am interested in purchasing textlink advertising on your website phillsacre.me.uk . Let me know if interested and we can discuss further details. I can make a good offer to make it worth your time.

Let me know!

Thanks
Charles Leich

From what I know of SEO, ‘Leich’ is probably quite a good name!

Last weekend, Matthew and Ellie gave us a “Wasgij”. This is basically a jigsaw, except that the picture you have to make is a “what happened next” of the picture on the front box. In our case, the front of the box had a picture on it with two secret agents about to be run over by a train. What we had to do was put the puzzle together to show what happened just afterwards, i.e. to show how the secret agents managed to escape. We’re nearly finished doing it (at least 3/4 of the way there)… the problem is that the things are so addictive! Seriously, we’ve both spent hours on this thing. So, thanks Matthew and Ellie for the hours of our lives that we won’t get back 😉 but seriously, it was great fun… if you like Jigsaws, then Wasgijs are quite an interesting twist on the idea.

Anyway. I think you can probably guess now what we spent most of the weekend doing! But I’ll run through some of the other stuff that we did. We spent a fair bit of Saturday in town doing various things, and also we did some work on the garden (I mowed the lawn using our new lawnmower, great fun!). In the evening we were tired so we watched a DVD, and then started the Wasgij (see above).

On Sunday morning we went to church. For the rest of the day we didn’t really do that much (again, see above).

Yesterday afternoon we went to B&Q, as we needed to buy a few things in order to decorate our bedroom. We bought a couple of tubs of paint, some paintbrushes and some rollers, and a steam paint stripper… I have to say, I am a little apprehensive as this is the first time that we’ve had to decorate a room for ourselves! But I’m sure that, with a little help and advice, it will go smoothly.

In the evening we picked up Alex, Karen and Steve and went to get Fish and Chips in Wivenhoe. It was a good evening! I also started assembling a BBQ my parents gave me for my birthday. So I suppose we’ll have to have a BBQ soon… yay!

And… that’s just about everything. Phew.

I’ve used Yahoo! Photos to store pictures for a while now. Any photos taken on our camera would get uploaded there. Unfortunately, Yahoo! Photos is closing. Which means that I haven’t uploaded any pictures there recently… I have been uploading photos to Facebook, but the problem with Facebook is that you can’t download the original images (I don’t think you can get at the originals even if you uploaded the images in the first place). Also, I want to give people access to the albums who aren’t on Facebook.

Anyway, Yahoo! also runs Flickr, another photo-sharing website, and they’ve also provided a photo migration service from Yahoo! Photos. So, I’ve decided to migrate all my albums in Yahoo! over to Flickr, and I will let you know once that’s all complete, and give the URL to access my photos.

One good thing about Flickr is that I believe there’s a Facebook application which integrates it with Flickr… that would be useful 🙂

Someone sent me an email today saying that they were interested in purchasing textlink advertising here. Their email address was apparently from mymasterweb.com (I won’t give a direct link to it for reasons which I shall attempt to explain).

Anyway, I didn’t really know what to think (no-one’s ever contacted me wishing to buy advertising space on this site before), but I thought I’d go and take a quick look at the site anyway. It’s a little bizarre. The whole site doesn’t really look like it has much content on it. It’s ostensibly to do with the programming language C#, but it has a massive links directory. Well, has a massive links directory index, which doesn’t actually have any links in it.

In other words, I think the site is just an SEO technique: the more links to your site there are on the internet, the higher ranknig you can get in Google. The higher ranking you have in Google, the more people come to your site. The more people come to your site, the more advertising revenue you can get… I think this is borne out by the fact that the site does link to a SEO company (Website Marketing India).

Anyway, this means that I’m not going to be selling advertising space here anytime soon…

Matthew 5:37, King James Version:

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

(source).

This weekend was the last weekend of our holiday. It was quite a busy one as well — we had to travel down to Gloucester for Matthew and Ellie’s wedding. [Hence the title… apologies to Grieg’s “Hochzeitstag auf Troldhaugen”]

We set off after lunch on Friday, and made good time – we didn’t really hit traffic until we were about 30 miles away! We stopped off in a village called Burford to have something to eat. I can’t remember the name of the pub we ate in, but it was pretty good! After dinner we drove to where we were staying for the weekend, at some friends of Philippa’s family.

On Saturday morning we drove into Gloucester to find the church. Matthew and Ellie had asked Philippa and I to ‘ush’, so we had to get there a bit early. We managed to find the church in plenty of time, and be ready for our duties! The weather was quite disappointingly wet, but that certainly didn’t dampen anyone’s spirits (sorry, I bet that phrase has been trotted out in magazines a lot recently, but I just had to get it in…). One thing which I have to mention is the wedding car: it was a stretch mini! Very appropriate, I thought.

After the wedding service, we drove fairly promptly over to the reception venue, and started preparing. It was obvious that Matthew and Ellie (and many other people) had put in a lot of work in preparation, and it really paid off – the whole thing went smoothly. Ian’s best man speech was brilliant, and Matthew and Ellie’s speech (done in the form of a poem) was fantastic!

After dinner there was dancing. Matthew and Ellie’s first dance was to a song from ‘Wicked’, which they’d choreographed themselves (I think). The music afterwards went really well (I’ve never seen a wedding done off an iPod and a single speaker before – I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but the atmosphere was none the less because of it); and as “musical consultant” I think the choice of music was very appropriate 😉

Anyway. To summarise, that evening was probably the most fun I’ve had recently, and it was great to see many of our old university friends again! It’s a shame we don’t all get together more often… Matthew and Ellie, can you have another reception in a couple of months? :p

I think that’s just about everything for the wedding. The rest of the weekend was fairly uneventful, so I’ll leave it there!