Place of Stuff

I have long been curious about how people find my site and what they do when they get here. There are a number of plugins you can install for WordPress, but there isn’t (as far as I know) one tool which shows everything. And now there is.

Woopra is an application which analyses your site traffic and can bring up a number of facts about who they are and what they do. Signing up is free - you sign up, submit your site(s) and await notification. At this time of writing, it can take around 7 days but I believe they are working on ways to speed this up. Once you have signed up, download the WordPress plugin, install the app (with a few extra steps for Ubuntu users!) and watch the graphs fill up.

Woopra is in beta at the moment, but I must say that it’s one of the most polished beta apps I have used. For example, on starting up you are presented with the dashboard (click for bigger):
Continue reading ‘Woopra - Website Analytics’ »

I have written before about the new law, Consumer Protections from Unfair Trading Regulations 2007, here. I thought it may be of interest if I explain a little about the Act and how it really affects psychics, psychic surgeons (so called), mediums and other purveyors of woo-woo. It really is a great Act and the mainstream news has picked up on it (in this country at least) and it has the purveyors very very nervous.

Firstly, let’s step back a few months. Under the previous act, the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951, there was little recourse for anyone who felt cheated by a medium. You see, all any medium has to do is stick “for entertainment purposes only” on their flyer in small print and you have no comeback. This is because the defence simply says that “it’s all a bit of fun and not meant to be taken seriously” and you have no case in law. In fact, a supposed psychic would have to do real harm for any case to be raised against them. You would have to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you were maliciously harmed for any case to get anywhere. Fine if you’re only out of pocket a few quid, less so if it harms your mental well-being. A pretty poor state of affairs, I’m sure you’ll agree.

This new Act has far more teeth. It treats the service a medium or psychic provides as exactly that: a service. So now, being in contact with your old Aunt Aggie is treated on the same level as having your windows double-glazed. That is, you are paying someone to give you a concrete service against an agreement and if you don’t receive the service satisfactorily and don’t get a refund, you can turn to the law and say “I paid for service X and didn’t get it and the provider of the service won’t give me satisfaction when I complained“. No legalese required, it’s very very black and white. The business section of The Times Online has an article on this written by the Director of Law for the Open University, Professor Gary Slapper. So now you can see why the sellers of woo-woo are a wee bit nervous.
Continue reading ‘Who’d Claim Psychic Powers in 2008?’ »

For all of my love of control and the other great stuff that comes with my usual distro, I also like to try out new things and see what’s going on elsewhere. To that end I decided to give Kubuntu a go. And I have been pleasantly surprised.

Firstly, the install itself. When you first boot up the build disk you are given several options, the one to use the disk as a live disk is still there, but you can choose to install directly from boot (as with other distros), I chose that and it went very quickly, as you would expect. I won’t go through the steps here as there were only a small number. Kubuntu installs a limited number of apps on first install, leaving you to use them or add to them as you wish.

Continue reading ‘Test Driving Kubuntu 8.04’ »

For all those of us running WordPress.org, just a heads up to say that a point released is available. 

Previous big number release was 2.5 and this is 2.5.1.

The Developer’s Blog has full details of the reasons for this upgrade, but in short:
Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.5.1’ »

Feel free to emphasise any of the words in the title.

No, this isn’t another “Seinfeld post“, at least, I hope that’s not how it comes out. Firstly, an apology: I do not consider myself qualified to write about blogging, beyond putting down my own experiences. If you are interested in the mechanics, there are far better sites out there who can talk knowledgeably about SEO and link farming (or pharming) and the best ways to get your blog seen by readers, some of them are on my Links page and others are not. Seriously. I think my all time highest view count was 200 and my most searched terms are “lesbians” and “donkey sex”. So please, get your blogging advice elsewhere.

OK, caveat over with. Anyone who may read this site will realise, ever so quickly, that it is totally random. It really is a place for me to just drop whatever is in my head onto the page. I have never hidden this and, in fact, take a sort of perverse pride in it. It also accounts for the fact that updates are only semi regular and ideas I say I’ll come back to I never do. But, recent posts on Untwisted Vortex made me think a little more about what I write about and about what others write. In particular, this post. And, by the way, if it looks as though I’m providing a load of links to one site then don’t worry - that site has a lot of good ideas and I read it every day, so it’s only natural that it will be on my mind.
Continue reading ‘What Do You Blog About (And Why?)’ »

Back in February, I discussed a book called Flat Earth News.  If you still haven’t read this book, please do so.  You will find yourself nodding your head and agreeing with so much of it; the book is all the more powerful because it is written by a journalist about journalism.  The snowball started by Nick Davies has now grown, The Churner Prize is the latest result of the book.  On the FAQ page, there is a video of an interview/discussion with Davies.

So what is The Churner Prize (apart from being a pun on “The Turner Prize”)? Well, the Why? Page has a go at answering the question.  Basically, a huge chunk of news out there isn’t news, it’s simply press releases from companies or rehashes of older stories put out simply because the story is relevant to a new program or documentary.  Sadly, few people recognise these rehashes because we are all used to the news being packaged and delivered to us and we accept that it is both news and new without question.

In Flat Earth News, Davies highlights a news story which appears in UK papers every time the World Cup is nearing.  It tells us that an average member of the public is planning to take out an insurance policy to cover the emotional trauma he will feel if England loses.  (For anyone reading along, in the hard back copy this is on page 49).  The book says:
Continue reading ‘The Churner Prize’ »