Monthly Archives: January 2006

Welcome New Blog Minions

Please put your hands together and welcome two new Blog Minions to the fold.

Joe (the Surly One) has earned his badge for sending me a new Redrick cartoon in my Christmas card (no, I’m not being slow on bestowing Minion honours, rather the card got caught up by Royal Mail and only arrived today). For those of you who know Joe/Redrick from of-old, the Surly Elven Ranger tm will need no introduction. If you don’t know him, well, Redrick is an Elf, who is known for being a bit grumpy on occasion. I have always loved Joe’s artwork, which might go some way to explaining why I have some of it emblazoned on my back, and this latest just goes to confirm my jealousy of his talent.
The Surly Elf Does Archaeology
The cartoon is on Flickr, so click to see bigger, and comment.

The River Queen gets honoured for finding the following news story today and passing it on to me over IM:
A parrot owner was alerted to his girlfriend’s infidelity when his talkative pet let the cat out of the bag by squawking “I love you Gary”.
Perhaps I should include Parrots in my list of evil animals?

Both of you get a Minion Badge to display proudly on your own website (if you have one), and are now listed as Blog Minions.

My army is growing. Mwhahahahaaa…!!!!

How to Code Accessible Links–Part One: The Basics

It gives me great pleasure to announce a mini-series of posts all about accessibility, hyperlinks, and images written by yours truly, and to be found posted over at Successful-Blog.

Please go and read it, and join in the great discussions you will find there. Liz and the rest of the community always make you feel welcome, which might go someway toward explaining why I made one comment and ended up writing three articles!

How to Code Accessible Links–Part One: The Basics, by Cas of Brightmeadow, at Successful-Blog

Come on! You know you want to be a successful blogger!

(In case you were wondering, that link was as accessible as I could make it. To find out how, well, go read the article 😉 )

Stowe Boyd – your wish is my command

(I was going to ‘Roast the following, but it’s a long time till next Sunday, and the link is possibly a bit too serious and grown-up for that anyway).

Finding someone whose voice makes sense to you, is a rare thing in this brave new world where everyone and their pet monkey thinks they can craft a sentence, despite glaring evidence to the contrary.

So, when one of the Few *1* asks for your help, well, the least you can do is give the guy a link: – Stowe Boyd’s new blog, /Message .

Go here if you want intelligent rants (yes, that is possible), about all things social/computing/collaboration/society, and let’s not forget, my favourite “Web 2.0” *2* I’m not saying my link’s going to get him much more traffic, nor do I think my assistance is really required, but I’m working on the principle of every little helps here. The chap gave me valid things to think about in the Demon Thesis, so not to link seems churlish.

Endnotes:
*1*If you can get that literary reference, there’s a cookie in it for you. Back
*2*That’s a Research Rant that will be coming in a few days or so. Back

Stowe Boyd

Celebration time!

I just noticed that BrightMeadow.co.uk went live officially a month ago today. In just that month there have been nearly 50 new posts, with 82 comments, and exciting collaborations are just around the corner.

My favourites / most memorable things have to be:

What have been your favourites?

When you consider that brightmeadow.blogspot.com only had 175 posts in near a year, it’s clear that I’ve been having a ball – I just hope all you readers have as well. Thank you, all my readers (both lurkers and minions). Here’s to many more months (years) of happy posting and commenting.

:clap_tb: :thumbup_tb: :clap_tb:

Spread the word – Bright Meadow is here to stay!
🙂

Sunday Roast – it’s always a good day when you see Daniel Craig’s naked bum

Before I start with the ‘Roast, I have a tip for you – if your daily bowl contains citrus fruit of any kind, brush your teeth after eating your breakfast. If, like me this morning, you just have to get rid of that morning-mouth before you can face a cup of tea let alone healthy food, wait a decent interval between brushing and munching. An hour later I was still going 😛 😛 to try and get rid of the fluoride/citrus conflict.

Boing Boing: Head-tripping four-eyes image. I’m not sure why, but I honestly can’t look at this image for more than a milli-second before my brain tries to turn itself insideout and my eyeballs explode.

hanzo:web. A kind of mutant love-child of del.icio.us and Internet Archive (or so it seems). I bring it to you because this kind of thing might work for you. I’ve signed up for an account so I will have a play and let you know more. At the moment though, I am not sure it does what it claims to do well enough to make me want to switch…

Adobe Labs – Project: Lightroom. Adobe have released a beta version of a new piece of photo software that has me going all goosepimply. Download the beta version free (requires a registration process) so you can have a play. You can rest assured I will be playing and let you know what I think. There is also a good introduction to be found here.
NB – The beta version expires when the program is commercially released, so if you are afraid you might fall in love with the program, and then not be able to afford the price tag (I saw a figure of around $400), then it might be an idea to steer clear! Also, beta version is currently Mac OS X only.

BBC NEWS – Ikea targeting British expansion. I must admit I am a fan of Ikea. The sofabed I got four years ago has done me Stirling service – for two years as a divinely comfortable bed, and since then as a great sofa. So when the time came to furnish Meadow Towers on a small budget, Ikea seemed like the obvious choice, barring the fact neither Moose nor myself have a car and that the nearest Ikea is 2 hours drive away (at least). So the thought of home delivery… Exciting! (At the same time, I do agree that it might not be a great thing that Ikea is taking over the world…)

MacBook Pro. My PowerBook is slowly starting to show it’s age. Things aren’t quite so zippy as they once were. It’s got a couple of scratches and bruises from a couple of years of dedicated service. I do love my 12″ G4. Nicknamed the ‘pocket calculator’, it has engendered much envy among coursemates over the years. I keep looking at it and can’t believe a working computer can exist in such a small, sleek, slab of titanium. I wouldn’t want to trade it (it is silly how invested you can get in a laptop!), but the new MacBook’s are certainly starting to call to me. Even if I had near £2000 to spend on a new computer, I’d still wait 6 months, following the law with ALL Apple products that you wait till the second gen of anything unless you want to be fighting bugs and recalls the rest of your life. Then again, same money, get top of the range desktop Mac and keep the Pocket Calculator for travel… (Ah, the dilemma. I do love spending money I don’t have, especially money I won’t have for several years unless another beloved relative pops their clogs, which is how I got the Pocket Calculator).

New Intel Macs Can Run Windows – a dual boot system? Oh, I am getting goose-pimply because all of a sudden the world of decent GIS is available on the Mac.

This animated drawing lets you watch the invisible artist draw a figure from the skeleton up. Fascinating to watch, and remarkably envy-inspiring as well.

Official Google Blog: Google Earth in a Mac world (PC too). I have one word for this – finally.

Lego knitting machine movie. Hypnotic and ever so slightly threatening…

Well, this article tells me more about the upcoming film “Bubble” than the trailer did. I also agree with Paul’s take on what the whole cinema going experience has become… Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against paying to see a movie, I just hate getting shafted for the priviledge

Fifty Writing Tools. We could all do with a little help in this respect.

Quick Online Tips: Absolutely Del.icio.us – Complete Tool Collection. A list of all the del.icio.us tools you could possible want to maximise your bookmarking experience.

As Moose said when she emailed me this link. Some people have far too much time on their hands. They’re Taking The Hobbits To Isengard

And to end on a lighter note, Ben Hammersley has the best blonde joke ever. All I can say is: I’m sorry, but it appealed to my sense of humour…

(And there are some del.icio.us leftovers for those of you with big appetites).

ACK!!!

Ack!
If you subscribe to the feed, please, please, please ignore a post that might appear entitled “Blog Basics – how to code accessible links”. It wasn’t ready for public consumption, I was just checking formatting, but hit ‘publish’ instead of ‘save as draft’ by mistake. Bugger! Yes, one of my blonder moments, but it is 2330 and I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. Anyway, ignore the post please 🙂

People want the weirdest things

I’ve highlighted before a few of the odd phrases by which people have stumbled across Bright Meadow – Chayanne in his underpants still being a personal favourite. (And yes, I posted that link just so we’d all have an excuse to look at that picture of Chayanne again) – and I figured it was time to have a quick look at some more, because it leads into what I want to talk about.

My new favourite, mainly because someone actually took the time to craft this phrase and type it into Google, is “A 1957 novel written by a british author were all the women are impregnated on the same night“. (They also get brownie points for using the word ‘impregnate’). Now the book you are looking for is John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckoos”, which you can find reviewed in a round-about way here. Currently such a search on google returns me as the second link, so I feel I should perhaps go back and re-write that review so that people get more information.

It also serves to reassure me on whether Google is indexing me or not.

Clearly as the previous paragraph shows, they must be, because you can get to me through searches, but tools such as Talk Digger and the Link Popularity Check return me with no presence on Google. Even Liz’s handy tip makes it look like Google hates me. Google Sitemaps isn’t exactly being helpful either and tells me that no one links to my site. This is a lie. I know of at least three places that do, and a couple of those have a decent PageRanks all of their own…

But I am getting high listings through some searches, so clearly Google don’t hate me completely. For example, rather reassuringly, a search for “cas sunday roast” returns me as the top link.

I’m confused. I used to think I understood search engine behaviour, now it has been made stunningly clear to me I have about as much comprehension of what goes on it Google’s mind as I do about what goes on in my own (None).

I may be confused, but I don’t care that there is some odd behaviour going on. At least I keep telling myself I don’t care. Yahoo! seems to like me ok, as does MSN search. Even Technorati has started to give me some love again (albeit a little haphazardly). It’s just Google. So what if one search engine has taken an irrational dislike to my shiny new site? People are evidently stumbling across Bright Meadow on a semi-regular basis, and my faithful Blog Minions still know where to find me, so what more do I need?

Love, affection, and PageRank, that’s what I need. I know shouldn’t, but I do. No matter what I might say, and how much I know it’s not a real measure of ‘success’, I do still harbour, in the back of my mind, irrational dreams such as being in the Technorati Top 100 Blogs. I’d like to be nominated for a Bloggie. Winning one is just too silly to even contemplate, but a nomination…?

Where’s this post going? No where. It just serves to mark my 🙁 at the current state of affairs. I actually don’t know what I’d do with a readership into double digits, let alone the triple and more you need for true blogging “fame”. PageRank can’t keep you warm at night like the love of a good Blog Minion can.

Still, who said I don’t deserve both…? 😉

google, yahoo, msn, technorati, bloggies, pagerank, blog minion, talk digger, link popularity check, google sitemaps