Diary Of An ADI

Posts Tagged ‘blog’

I was recently approached by another website to allow my curry recipe to be used on their site. I was more than happy for that to happen – until I read the comments of one (and then several) of their members!

This website is about driving and driving instruction. I add a few of my own thoughts and opinions as the fancy takes me. I like curry and cooking, so that also features. It is a blog.

blog – definitions

• a regularly updated website wherein texts or articles of one or more authors are shown in a reverse-chronological order, meaning the first one is the latest one. Authors conserve the right to post works they consider pertinent.
• is a short form of “web log”. Log means a diary or journal, usually a notebook where you write regular reports of what you did or thought. Every ship has a “captain’s log” in which the captain records details of the ship’s voyage day by day.
• A “web log” or online diary. Blogs have been identified as an increasingly popular source of online publication, especially regarding political information, opinion publication and alternative news coverage.

The other website is a forum about curry (and takeaway recipes generally). Forums are often frequented by trolls:

troll - definition

Forum trolls are users that repeatedly and deliberately breach the netiquette of an established online community, posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages to bait or excite users into responding or to test the forum rules and policies, and with that the patience of the forum staff. Their provocative behavior may potentially start flame wars (see below) or other disturbances. Responding to a troll’s provocations is commonly known as ‘feeding the troll’ and is generally discouraged, as it can encourage their disruptive behavior.

This is specifically why I have comments on this blog turned off. On the rare occasions I have turned them on, I have immediately been spammed or trolled by the likes of those who posted the comments I refer to on this other website. I mean, why? Why turn a simple “can I use your curry recipe” into a pathetic – yet typical – forum war? The guy who started it is specifically the kind of person who gets frequent mentions on this blog. It really is a shame that forum owners and moderators don’t keep the mental cases under stricter control!

What I choose to post on this blog is my business (just like it would be if I kept a journal or diary). People can take it or leave it as they choose – and if that means behaving like prats and trolling other forums, that’s fine. But they can’t do it here, because I won’t let them.

The website which approached me already has people questioning the recipe. There’s too much garam masala, there’s not enough garam masala, too much this, too much that, etc. One deity opines “it looks familiar”! Why? God only knows. Just try the damned recipe, and either like it or don’t!

The recipe is there for people to try if they want to. They will either like it, or they won’t like it. The decision is theirs – not some berk who thinks he knows all there is to know about curry and can tell what it will taste like just by looking at it!

Mind you, although the number of hits I get on this site is quite large – driving instructors (not wannabe curry chefs) frequent it – this childish little episode has sent it a lot higher.

Why do so many people who come to this blog apparently do so using the above search term?

If you are looking for a franchise then you are undoubtedly unable to generate your own work (or enough of it). You’ve most probably discovered how expensive it is to advertise – and also how unsuccessful such advertising can often be. If you’ve been independent, you’re probably clawing in desperation at options which might save you – and yet you’re still ‘indie’ enough to refuse point blank to choose the ones more likely to save you simply because they go more against your ‘indie’ principles than the others do.

So what on earth makes you think someone offering a free franchise (if such a thing exists), or even a cheap one, is automatically going to do any better than you did?

You need a company that is established, and those will be the ones charging you a sensible amount for their franchise. If someone is likely to attract a lot of pupils as a franchise organisation, they will be spending money to achieve that. They’re hardly going to offer the results of that expenditure for free.

If someone is offering it for free, there are far more questions I’d want answering before flinging myself into a last chance to escape bankruptcy.

I noticed one of the Google ads that keeps cropping up on the right side of this blog trumpets:

Drving (sic) Instructors Wanted

If you’re going to advertise, at least check the spelling on your advertising copy!

Disclaimer: Any spelling mistakes (other than those on the Google ads) in this blog are typos, and I blame the computer.

As an artefact to upgrading my database from mySQL 4.0 to mySQL 5.0 (so I could apply the latest WordPress update), I noticed a whole heap of  ‘Â’ symbols had appeared in my previous posts.

I started to edit them out, then realised there must be a better way. Thanks to Brad J Frey’s blog, I fixed it in about 15 seconds.

All you have to do is log into your PHPMyAdmin control panel for the database you want to change, then choose the SQL button, as shown here:

PHPMyAdmin For Database

This opens up a window – make sure you select the SQL tab:

MySQL Query Window

This is the query I used to get rid of the  symbols:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET post_content = replace(post_content,””,”");

The general format is:

UPDATE `tablename` SET fieldname = replace(fieldname,”what-to-replace”,”what-to-replace-with”);

Just hit GO and the replace operation is done very quickly.

EDIT 22/12/2009: But even better than this, I found a plugin for WordPress which does the search and replace for you. Thanks to thedeadone.net for that. It’s much better.

There seems to be a worldwide conspiracy amongst vendors of this type of software – where you can analyse the log files which record who visited your site.

The software is either free (which also means that it has to be impossibly complicated to install and set up unless you wrote it in the first place), or you pay for it (which means having to rob a large bank in order to afford a version which comes even close to meeting some of your basic requirements).

I discovered this over the last two days. WordPress’s stats plugin started playing up, and I was confronted with a never-changing bar graph which showed absolutely meaningless data. So I began looking for something a bit more advanced. I started with the free stuff, like you do. I managed to find one or two open-source programs which didn’t involve downloading the source code, compiling it, and deploying it yourself (a lot of open-source stuff is extremely experimental). I managed to get some of them working, only to discover the authors appear to have a bar chart fixation (and a crap bar chart fixation, at that). Why is it that open-source programmers usually have absolutely no concept of neat appearance or ease-of-use? You inevitably have to install some obscure patch (or Java – and wade through the 3 million variants it exists as to get the right one, usually an older version because the open-source you are trying to use won’t run on the current version), and then find out it won’t work anyway!

After trialling a couple of free ones I quickly discovered their limitations. Probably the main one is that the log files my host provides contain the hits for all the sites I host on my webspace, and these freebies just take the whole file and process it without any filtering.

So I switched my attention to the ones you have to pay for. The cheapest one I found was about $70 – and that is not cheap at all, when you consider you can get fully-functional video authoring suites (for example) for less than half that price. But they nearly all exist in various versions: beginner, business, pro, and so on, and the one that has the features you might need is always one of the top-end versions – and the price now leaps to at least $150 and sometimes as much as £2,000

If you’re going to spend anything like this kind of money you want to try the software first, right? So with one of them I did. Everything was going perfectly smoothly right up to the not-so-insignificant part where I tried to run the 30-day trial for the first time:

You have altered your system clock to try and circumvent copy-protection. Blah, blah, blah!

No I bloody haven’t. I have just installed the program and run it for the first time and this message came up less than 5 seconds later. So have a word with Mr Uninstaller, and enjoy your duel with the Recession.

I did discover that many of these Commercial Thugs provide a ‘lite’ version (i.e. free), but I also discovered that the lite version is invariably totally useless – like buying a car, and finding out the free ‘lite’ model doesn’t come with an engine or wheels. Or a chassis. And maybe not even paint.

I installed a few others and got nowhere. Some simply wouldn’t run. Others were utter rubbish. In fact, I was unable to trial a single one that appeared to come even close to what I wanted – and they expect me to pay $150+ for this? Think again.

Anyway, WordPress seems to have sorted out the prolonged outage that it didn’t tell me about, so I can stick with that for a while longer. I suppose it did tell people somewhere or other. But unless you are more interested in talking about WordPress than actually using it I guess you’d miss it.