Ellie Greenwich, songwriter par excellence, died yesterday in a New York City hospital of a heart attack, having been admitted for pneumonia. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Adding Amazon ads for different countries
UPDATE, July 2011: I'm now using the WordPress-Amazon-Associate plugin, so much of what's written below is no longer relevant. WPAA seems to do almost everything in one easy-to-use plugin, so give it a go if you're interested.
Some time ago I started looking into ways to add Amazon products to help monetise a WordPress site. My major requirement was to automatically set my affiliate IDs for a range of different Amazon stores, with products appearing depending on a user's worldwide IP location.
I was working on a site with a potentially global reach (aren't they all?), and didn't want to limit the potential by pushing people towards just one Amazon store. Here's how I did it. Continue reading
Google, NY skanks and the right to libel
Model Liskula Cohen recently filed a lawsuit against Google because the company initially refused to reveal the name of the anonymous blogger who described her in defamatory terms on a Google-hosted blog, Skanks in NYC. Cohen then turned to the New York Supreme Court, which ordered Google to reveal Port's identity.
Now the blog author - Rosemary Port - has hit back with a $15m lawsuit. Her argument is that Google "breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity". In plain English, this means she thought she was legally protected from having her identity revealed, regardless of what she wrote. Continue reading
Dental records, fingerprints and… breast implants?
Amid the shabby recent tale of the suicide of a man suspected of murdering his former wife in California, a detail caught my eye. The woman in question, Jasmine Fiore, was identified by the serial number on her breast implants. Continue reading
The wonderful Tenori-On
Something of a hybrid between a musical instrument and a sequencer, the Tenori-On is an innovative product from Yamaha that looks like a whole lotta fun. Continue reading
Adding h1 tags to your WP theme’s page headers
I recently coded my own theme for The Beatles Bible, which I documented elsewhere. However, earlier today I was doing a bit of reading on search engine optimisation, and learnt that many WordPress themes have the same h1 tag across the entire site - commonly linked to the site's name in the header.
I hadn't realised, but my theme was the same - the result of following a how-to guide I'd found on the web. Here's some information on how to make it work more efficiently and get that web traffic coming in better. Continue reading
Thoughts on buying and selling houses – part two
Earlier I wrote about the difficulty of supply and demand when buying or selling a house, caused by an unwillingness or inability to accept a market value for a property. But I wanted to write about one thing that struck me repeatedly when searching for a house to move to - the craziness of the UK's offer system. Continue reading
Thoughts on buying and selling houses – part one
Moving house in a recession isn't easy unless you're at the bottom of a chain, and have a decent deposit to buy somewhere. And the lack of first-time buyers is exactly what's hampering the UK housing market right now. Continue reading
Writing a WordPress theme from scratch
I recently completed a relaunch of The Beatles Bible - putting together a theme from scratch and styling the css myself, and I thought I'd write a brief update on my findings. Continue reading
Sense Of Doubt – David Bowie
Sense Of Doubt was one of the instrumental tracks on David Bowie's album "Heroes". Here's a rarely-seen video:
It's not one of my favourite Bowie songs; I just liked the name, and the vague feeling of confusion and displacement that the music perfectly echoes.