Today Is My Bloggiversery

Four years ago today I started blogging. In my first blog I finished up by saying.

...the chance I might meet or at least talk to suitable chaps who read the Guardian, scrub up nice and like real ale.

Who'd have thunk that I would have ended up marrying the person who inspired me to start blogging and I would be imminently expecting our first child?

As for the real ale? well two out of three ain't bad.

Bullying Bloggers

I hope Merk won't mind but I'm just gonna lift this straight from Mailwatch

"It appears that simply removing ‘offending material’ from ones blog isn’t enough for some web hosts - friend of the Mailwatch (he did our logo) Tim Ireland'

s Bloggerheads, ex-Uzbekistan British Ambassador Craig Murray, Labour Councillor Bob Piper and Boris Johnson MP’s blogs have all disappeared off the interweb today because a high flying (no doubt high charging) law company has used it’s legal status to bully the ISP into shutting down the sever all these blogs reside on.

Whilst info is sketchy at the moment but it appears that it all relates to some posts and linkage about Russian Billionaire Alisher Usmanov. My understanding is that the comments his law team objected to were removed when requested days ago. This is a disgrace.

I don’t normally post non Mail/Express stuff on here but I felt the need to let people know what is happening with those blogs in case you’re wondering and just to point out that what we’re doing here, or if you blog yourself is fast becoming a risky business if those with unlimited cash can effectively bully those without into the submission of their supposed free speech - even after the comments are removed as requested!

Please feel free to comment but do bear in mind that I’ll be liable in court and I really need to keep hold of the 16pence credit in my bank and my 7 year old Vauxhall Astra!

Heads up to Iain Dale , Tom Watson , Chicken Yoghurt , Obsolete"

Fasthosts is the ISP just in case you were thinking about choosing a host in the near future.

There Are Times

When I wish that I had chosen to have an anonymous blog so I could rant, moan or dish the dirt on some of the things I've seen, done or had done to me but wouldn't wish to associate myself with in a public forum such as this. But I choose to be fairly open about my identity, told my mother and aunt about my blog so every now and then, they check in on it to see if I'm still typing. I made the decision not to blog about what I do because it is not intrinsically interesting to most people but there are times when I wish I could without fear of comeback. Now is one of those times but I made my choices and I have to abide by them.

Road Rage

I've got another driving lesson tomorrow, the thrills and spills of Thursday didn't put me off or drive the instructor into early retirement so we are going to scare the residents of Fenlandshire once more. I am sort of pleasantly surprised at how much I can do already after one lesson but I'm also very aware that I've still got a way to go, I'm doing the typical learner drivers trick of driving too slowly, my speed sense is woeful at the moment, 20 miles an hour seems plenty fast enough, thank you.

Just to make it more challenging for the other road users the instructor took the advertising box off the top of the car once he had seen my licence and had reassured himself that it was a full licence. I was quite happy with this until I realised that it meant that there was no warning to other drivers that there was a non-competent driver at the wheel. It was the car behind almost right up my jacksee when I was doing about 29 in a 30 mile an hour zone that gave me the clue, if there had been learner stickers on the car he would have stayed well away :D

I really enjoyed the lesson and driving again, it was exciting and thrilling. But that night I had reoccurring nightmares about being attacked by invisible aluminium monsters - very Freudian I'm sure.

Meh

I am alive but my blogging muse seems to be having a winter sun break somewhere.

Wish I was too.

Has Anyone Else Seen This?

Radio Five Live's blog about blogs is looking for nominations for unsung blogs you know, the ones you enjoy but don't get the limelight like say Random Acts Of Reality does (and deserves too.)

Anyway here's the link mind you I'm not giving it because I want to be nominated, I really don't I'm not good enough for that sort of exposure, mind you neither is Dooce but that's another blog post I will write one day.

Does Anyone Know Any Poems About Conservation Officers?

Cos I got a hit from someone who needs to know.

"poem describing what a conservation officers does"

Although I did recently invest in some English Poetry I don't know of any such poems. But being the helpful sort I thought I could write some so channelling the spirit of McGonagall I did this

I am a conservation officer,
I like to save the bees,
They are very important,
as they fertilise the trees

Then I realised that the searcher was probably thinking of the buildings sort of conservation officer but I can't think of anything that rhymes with cornice at the mo.

Metablogging again.

The thing about blogging is sometimes I only have a pertinent sentence or two about one subject then some waffle then another short paragraph of interest on another subject and so on. Probably not enough for a worthwhile post alone but together all the interesting sentences together I would get a bitty, but hopefully worthwhile post. But the feeling that blog posts must have a coherent theme is a difficult one to overthrow. I would love to be able to jump from subject to subject like Siobhan does, without feeling self conscious.

Writing prose of any form doesn't come easily to me, I tend to trip up over the words. The seamless bit of prose I had conjured up in my head turns into poo as my fingers type it out. I have this problem at work as well, I agonise over writing letters to customers and contractors how words are used is very important in what I do, so care has to be taken by everyone. But again I can't turn the carefully crafted phrase I thought about in my head into the writing on the the page because the words seem to run away from me when I start committing them to hard disc.

My old boss would stare at the screen with a pensive gaze for about 5 minutes as she thought about the letter at hand, then her fingers would be a blur as she tapped out her thoughts on the page, apart from perhaps the tweaking of a comma or the double check of the specific meaning of a word it would all be there as she wanted it, making sense, in not much more than half an hour. Me, I know what to say, I understand the problem but I can't get it onto paper without a struggle.

And I blog.

For fun.

I must be an idiot.

Testing the phone

So far I've tried out the radio on the phone that was fun listening to the presenter panic as the Morse code went on and on and on. After wailing and gnashing of teeth from me Si finally got the phone's email to work. I've tested sending to flickr, to the blog via flickr and now to the blog directly using the email address, then that will be the last of the tests hopefully.

Gothicly

Gothicly
Originally uploaded by Jane Goth.

I am testing mobile photo blogging

Missed It

At some point yesterday evening, the 30,000th visitor arrived on my blog, had a look around then buggered off. Well that's what I think they did, I don't know as I missed it completely and my stat counters only cover the details of the last 100 visitors and by the time I looked the counter was at 30,103. I will never know. But still a big thanks to you all for the support you have given me over the last 17 months, in the words of the immortal Goons: "I will wear it always!"

Tranny Feet the sequel

One of the photos on this blog gets me traffic at a steady rate; a very steady rate in fact, I would say at least one hit a day often more. It happened by accident I didn't know that there was an audience for this but there is, so purely in the interests of science I present more tranny feet.

Sugar And Spice And All Things Nice

I saw on Kim's blog a link to some idiot's report on female bloggers. Apparently we are nice and hot and friendly and everything. And the female bloggers at BlogHer already know about blogging so he didn't have to explain what blogging was to the little ladies.

Ian Betteridge has already picked out a few choice sentences for us to marvel at, but here is one of mine.

BlogHer this weekend created a lifetime of memories. Women are different from men, here I am at age 51, and I've still got more to learn. They come in all ages, shapes and sizes and they came from all over the world.

No shit Sherlock!

quick update

Just had a look and I'm back to slithering reptile but still with only 8 links listed.

Ego Thy Name Is Blogger.

First off and as an aside, although I very much doubt that you can start a post or a piece of writing with an aside. Does anyone know who coined the phrase "Ego Thy Name Is ..."? I did a quick search on Google and couldn't find anything.

Anyway to get to the point, I was happily logging into my blog yesterday evening when I found that on the TTLB Ecosystem I had dropped from being a Slithering Reptile to being a Crawly Amphibian. So I checked and it had lost 8 of the links it had had recorded against my blog. So I've done a count of all the links I know about, 22 sites link to me so it was wrong with Slithering Reptile anyway, I should have been a Flappy Bird.

Now I know it is only a bit of fun really. But godamnit, I'm a blogger, I have an ego, a delicate and fragile ego that needs, craves, the satisfaction that knowing my mitherings are thought interesting enough by someone to go to the effort of tweaking their template just a little to add me to their reading list or add me to their blogroll.

So I checked Technorati - Wrong. Blogshares - Wrong. My "who links to me" link doesn't work at all, that is the second time the code seems to have failed so next time I tweak my own template I think it's coming out. It looks ugly anyway.

I know we bloggers are delicate souls, we spend our time at work fretting over our stats, how many readers today, how many are new, how many returned, we wonder if our stats will be down today? How long did they spend dwelling over the posts we have lovingly crafted? We talk amongst ourselves about which is the best free log counter. Whole posts, like this one, are devoted to the howl of anguish that occurs when our popularity is not properly reflected.

So what it the answer? Well here at Goth Towers there is now a piece of paper with a list of all the people that I know link to me. I treasure them all, except the swinging site (not included in the 22) as I treasure you, the reader.

Grrr Broadband

Not mine I hasten to add, but my Mother's. The lack of blogging action from me yesterday was caused by me going round to my Mum's to help her get on broadband. The drivers for the modem installed like a dream we attached the relevant cables signed in and then the trouble started I was able to download the Zone Alarm free firewall for her but the computer kept on prompting us to reconnect to the internet and the number of times got "cannot find server" was phenomenal. So we decided to contact the free help line to ensure that we hadn't don't anything when I rang the number on Mum's landline I could hardly hear the computerised voice because of churning and whirling of the internet it sounded bit like the noise that dial up makes. In the end I had make the call by mobile.

Anyway to cut a long and frustrating couple of hours short we had two configurations 1 with the microswitch in the wall socket then the signal splitter plugged into that, with the extension to the computer and the phone line coming out of that. The phone was clear, but absolutely no broadband what so ever, the computer didn't pick up a byte of a signal.

The other way round, with the signal splitter in the wall socket and the micro switch and the phone line coming out of that, the puter realised it was attached to the internet but kept asking to be reconnected every five seconds and the phone line had a lot of noise on it again.

I consulted with my brother who is a computer expert he has suggested new microswitches and a shielded extension cable but I was wondering whether anyone else has had this problem and came up with a different solution.

Enough About Me Lets Talk About You

Site Meter and Stat Counter are wonderful, they capture all sorts of data about the people who visit the site, either by accident or on purpose from them I know that I've had visitors who have come from I know for instance that you are mostly British but with a strong showing from the US but I've had hits from people in

Austria, Australia, Argentina, Aruba, Albania, Azerbaijan, Burma, Belgium, Brazil, Bahrain, Belize, Burkina Faso, Bulgaria, Bermuda, Canada, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Colombia, Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, China, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Estonia, France, Finland and Fiji, Germany, Greece, Guam, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Iran, India, Indonesia, Italy, Iceland, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Lithuania, Latvia, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Macedonia, Mauritius, Mexico, Malta, Morocco, Monaco, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Nicaragua, Niger, New Guinea, Qatar, Romania, Russia - (I so want to type USSR, showing my age now), Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Africa, St Lucia, Sweden, Singapore, Serbia and Montenegro, Switzerland, Syria, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Peru, Philippines, Papua, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Slovakia,Taiwan, Turkey, Tunisia, Thailand, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, USA - (doh I've had lots of American visitors), United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Vietnam, Venezuela, Yemen.

You should have been working:

BBC, US DOD, UK MoD, many hospitals and universities included Yale, Southampton, Lancaster, and Cornell, USAF, The Lady, Parliament, Group 4, Oxfam, Hat Trick Productions, The Chilean Ministry of Agriculture, Universities in Nashville and Los Angeles, Fermi Lab, NICE, the French Department of Agriculture, The National Center Of Atmospheric Research in Colorado

Many have been disappointed when searching for:

Wet Pussy - sorry that post is mostly about me hating PE

Scissor Sisters & Toilets - What?

Tgirl - I'm a Real Girl rather than a TGirl

Richard Ashcroft & Maria Carey - not musical bed fellows I would have said.

Tommy Balls - purveyors of the finest shoes with holes in them.

Boots Preview - there seems to be a start of a trend here

The phone number of the Kings Lynn Branch of Frankie and Benny's

Barbie T-Girl - now I know because I have links to trannie blogs and I occasionally talk about TG things so I know that I'm going to get hits when people do searches for TGirl with a modifier. I'm cool with that, I've been toying with linking to UK Angels if advice is what they are searching for. However what got me about this link was when I followed back to the referrer it was a swinging site who had linked to me based purely on a google or yahoo search - urgh I felt dirty. But if anyone comes here looking for Barbie T-Girls I can oblige please see below.


Happy?

I also help many, or not, as the case may be, with the writing of leaving speeches

Hayley Atwell is always very popular as well.

Last Updated 10 December 07

Can Any One Think Of A David Bowie Song I Could Use For A Title?

As you can see I've changed my template, I decided that after a month I really did not like the pink of the background so rather than faff around changing it (translation - I don't know how to) I would go for a different style all together. Plus I rather like having the sidebar to the left being left handed it seems more natural to me. I want to fiddle around with it a bit more but I still haven't got round to buying a book on "HTML For The Easily Confused"

What's the Farsi for Oi Pervert?

Well it has worked, have a post called wet pussy and a few weirdos will hit on my site. So far I've had a very disappointed Aussie who was looking for wet pussy and mum - sicko! and this one who was looking for wet pussy and blogspot. That's not the thing that surprised me so much as where he is from! Yes a big sloth hello to my first Iranian vistor!


VISITOR ANALYSIS
Referring Link http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=wet pussy%2Cblogspot&ei=UTF-8&fr=ush1-mail&fl=0&x=wrt
IP Address 217.xxx.xxx.x
Country Iran, Islamic Republic Of

stats from stat counter

PS the mortifying thing, the really mortifying thing was that I was third in the list.

Blatent Theft.

I've been catching up on my favourite blogs Joanna has two wonderful links which I am going to blatently knick because they are worth it. Flame warriors and bugs.

Oh Look At My Stats...

Being linked to by Music Spot has done wonders to my stats I was plodding along getting about 12 max regulars a day, a few first time visitors and about 40 page view then suddenly my stats went through my very modest window.

On Thursday I got 395 page views and 223 unique visitors. For me it's madness because I'm happy with my 10 to 12 regular readers and if I was getting another 5 to 8 first time visitors and 30 views I'm a fluffy bunny. But the numbers I've been getting over the last two days for me woah! I know it won't last in fact it hasn't here are my stats


I know it won't last if I pick up one or two new readers I'll be very pleased.

What I have found most exciting is where all the visitors have come from, there is something every exciting about the thought that my blog may be being read by someone in Finland or Canada.

This has turned into another blog about blogging I'm afraid but I'm still very excited by the whole phenomena I'll grow out of it I'm sure .

But this was not what I had thought I was going to blog about the other evening I've got a whole rant about the ID card thing but it will have to wait for another time cos it is now silly o'clock and I've got to go to bed.

Good night you all.