I’ll just ignore that fact that i never rescued the only posts from this blog, and just carry on shall i? Yes. Because onward we forge, and i just launched a new fansite, hooray! www.thestreetsofsanfrancisco.net is the first and (for the moment) only fansite for the seventies cop drama The Streets of San Francisco. I’ve got screencaps up the kyber on there, and i hope to compile plenty of info on the characters and trivia on the ‘verse as a whole. I can’t wait to get it filled out, and i do wonder if i’ll find any fellow fans or not. I was surprised there were no other fansites out there, and the chance of creating a little community would be kind of cool. We shall see.

So go check it out, and behold the wonder of Steve Keller’s enormous sideburns. And how all the guys call each other ‘baby’. Rawr. Let’s see how long it takes for that site to hit number one in Google for Streets of San Francisco, eh?

And now, back to Tears For Fears, Pepsi Max and another fansite i am working on. Interwebs multi-tasking, yo.

Well thank pants for that - i was thinking the blog was going to remain dithering in limbo for another night. My previous posts will be imported, and i’ll get down to some new blogging soon, but for now it’s time for some rest. I’ve spent the last hour trying to get this sorted, after realising my new hosting-provider doesn’t provide mySQL with my hosting package. Anyhoo, i got around that, and here we be.

Posts and photos will be returning post haste. But post haste tomorrow.

…they go together so well, it’s strange. Or perhaps it’s destiny. ::stares wistfully towards the heavens::

I’m fairly sure i’ve overdosed on soda, even with my high tolerance levels. I found some Coke Orange in the store on the way home - basically some guy finally worked out how to turn on the Fanta and the Coke taps at the cinema, and realised what everyone else did years ago: it tastes nice. Not that it’s got anything on Dr Pepper Berries & Cream, so i had to go and drink a few cans of that afterwards to re-affirm my obsession. No wonder i nearly threw up during my workout yesterday, i’m sloshing with soda and chocolate, not gooooooood… (at least i wasn’t dumb enough to actually drink a load of soda before the session - i learnt my lesson about that when i had two cups of tea before trying out a Kung Fu class, and the whole class were sniggering as i sloshed my way through sit-ups. Seriously, it was like listening to someone tipping a water-bottle up and down, up and down… so embarrassing.)

What with the soda and the burger i had for dinner, oh god it was so good. I could feel it dissolving my insides. Why is beef and cheese so tasty? Gah.

Read this, for some bang-on Geek Girls info (except i’m not so sure about crushing on Han Solo or Luke, mleh. And emotion scifi eps as important as explosion eps? I don’t think so!). I’m off to watch Datalore, download some Andromeda, study Linux some more, and worry about the tomato plants i seem to be successfully murdering in our back garden. :s

If ‘geek’ means ‘lying in bed all day’, then i am a geek. Sadly, i don’t think it does, which means i am just a slob. Furthermore, i’m a lazy slob, since this weekend consisted of me not bothering to get out of my pyjamas for the whole of Saturday, and then getting dressed on Sunday only to get back into bed fully clothed and go back to sleep anyway (sleep interspersed with TV shows, Fab ice lollies, the odd bowl of soup and finally some microwaved chicken hotpot).

If it wasn’t for my confidence with SEO, i’d be worried i wasn’t a geek at all, but just a complete and utter dork. A dork, i think, is basically the same as a geek but without any skill. My coding, tech-knowledge and media know-how is always expanding but constantly (it seems) not as developed as those around me. My roller-skating looks all very impressive and cool until i hit a piece of grit, and then it’s all-hands-to-the-flailing and another small number of Exmouth citizens realise how close i really am to falling on my face every morning on the way to work.

To make myself feel better, i did a bit of research into hacking this weekend (Because what has a more cool reputation?? I really am a dork aren’t i, jesus.) and read up a bit about SQL injection. I also used the resources at my disposal to fix the darned gap above the titles in this blog… i found me some webmonkeys! I used the forums on www.iconbuffet.com, put the wordpress css files online, and offered to receive a big points-earner icon set to the first person to solve the css gap problem. Three minutes after i posted the blog entry, my css problem was sorted (it was even more of an obvious fix than i had feared), i had no icon tokens, and i’d threatened all parties involved with grievous harm if there was any css mockery at all.

Yay for bribery and webmonkeys! :D

It’s not really a common occurance that a blog or news article about Search Engine Optimisation will get me excited. Interested yes, because it my job afterall to know what’s happening and why. But rarely do i find myself thinking screw lunch, i’m going to read this article on how to list top for ‘light fittings’ instead, whoo!.

However (no, this isn’t just a completely pointless whinge about how boring SEO articles are, it actually has a counterpoint!), there is one blog series that really got my attention in the past, and the author is at it again.

A while back, Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide, wrote a series called Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and 30 Days. She blogged every day about starting up a business that had to turn a profit in 30 days. Following the process from scratch was fantastically addictive, and it soon became the case that the first thing me and my SEO colleague would mention (that’s me quoted in her blog) when we came into work was Jennifer’s next post in the series.

I was pretty disappointed when the series ended, and i haven’t checked Search Engine Guide’s pages for quite a while. I popped in today however and was ecstatic to see that Jennifer has started another series! The Hide & Speak project has another interesting challenge - to make money on an online business website without any of the major search engines. The major search engines have been blocked in the website’s robots text file, and Jennifer and her business partner are working on getting sales from the site mainly through social networking and link building methods.

What with SEO careering towards social-networking anyway, it’s going to be really interesting to see how a pro does it, and how successful they are without Google. There is certainly room for the concept that Google is not the be-all and end-all of SEO online, and that nowadays Search Engine Optimisation shouldn’t necessarily be focused on ’search engines’ anymore. I would suggest changing the name to just Optimisation, but i have difficulty enough already introducing myself as an SEO - if i have to go around saying i’m an O i’ll feel like something off Sesame Street.

Cat: “Is that what I think it is?”
Lister: “What do you think it is?”
Cat: “An orange whirly thing in space!”
(Red Dwarf)

There is something to be said for finding your internet tasks boring, because although it’s a pain, you watch the clock like a hawk and break away at the first opportunity to go do something else. Compare this to the times when you find internet tasks gripping, and it’s preferable even through all the fidgeting and endless copy-pasting (or whatever mind-numbing task floats yer boat). The last two evenings have disappeared into this black hole of a computer-screen, as if the second i sit down at my desk Hiro appears over my shoulder and speeds up time, standing there with his hunched shoulders and little furrowed brow.

But roughly 8 hours of ignoring the dishes and forgetting to eat later, my website is finally looking reasonably presentable. Sure the headings are in some kind of burn-your-eyes-out red/orange color, but i like it, so you’ll just have to deal with the pain. The last 4 hours have gone towards skinning this damned Wordpress blog - and for the life of me i cannot work out where the whitespace below my banner is coming from. I’ve checked everything a dozen times over, snarled at the computer, checked every goddamn possible div and class and id and thingamebob, but no joy.
In the individual entry view pages the content is also throwing the whole page slightly to the left, but i’ve not given that any investigation yet. For 5 pixels, i can launch now and fix later.

And launch i shall. It will be exciting - no doubt the blockquote i have used in this blogpost will initiate some kind of self-destruct process in my php coding.