Archive for August, 2009
Remembering Ellie Greenwich
Ellie Greenwich, songwriter par excellence, died yesterday in a New York City hospital of a heart attack, having been admitted for pneumonia. Read the rest of this entry »
Adding Amazon ads for different countries
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Amazon
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: google
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: little boots, tenori-on
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: housing
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: housing
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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:
Tags: david bowie