Pickled blog

I've just discovered that this blog appears somewhat mangled in Internet Explorer. For some freaky reason, the page footer is appearing in the middle of the blog. Please bear with me, IE users, whilst I find a fix. Better still - download Firefox! It's so much better than that Microsoft rubbish :).

P.S. It seems Blogger is effed - again. I can't preview or save any templaye changes. I think it's the 'contact me' button that has upset stupid Internet Explorer, so I'm trying to relocate it to the sidebar.

New poll

Just posted a new poll in my sidebar. Please take a second to vote. As a long-time cat owner, who is hopefully about to become a dog owner, too, I'm curious to see whether my readers prefer cats or dogs. Or perhaps you like both equally? Or maybe you don't like either. At the moment, I still prefer cats, although I'm really looking forward to caring for a certain cute little Cavalier King Charles spaniel. All I can say, is thank heavens I don't have a soft spot for Rottweilers or Great Danes!

Don't be shy!

As you may have noticed, I've recently added a 'contact me' button, which appears at the end of every post. Please feel free to use it, if you ever want to get in touch. It will take you to a contact form. All you have to do is fill in your name, email address and message, enter the CAPTCHA details, and send. Hopefully, the CAPTCHA feature will keep scumbag spammers away.

Strange Days updated

I have a couple of new posts up at Strange Days, if anyone's interested. I've decided to do a few articles on paranormal happenings in Wales, so I've posted a couple of articles about ghosts, as well as the alleged concealment of the Holy Grail in Mid Wales.

Ghosts and the Holy Grail - Nanteos Mansion

The Ghost of Pc. Hosea Pope

Please feel welcome to stop by and leave a comment.

Blogger problems?

Is anyone else experiencing intermittent problems with Blogger? Over the last few days, Blogger has either been very slow, or unreachable. Maybe it's just this stupid, ancient computer of mine. It's very frustrating, because nearly every time I come here to post something - computer says no! Grr.

The curse of Google Reader

I started using Google Reader 2 or 3 months ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The only trouble is, I now tend to read blog feeds, rather than the feeds themselves. As a result, I'm not commenting half as much on other people's blogs, as I used to. Although I like the convenience of Google Reader, I've just realised that I'm losing touch with a lot of people. By reading the feed, and not commenting, people don't realise I'm still visiting them. Well, I jolly well am! I really must make greater effort to visit the actual blog posts, and leave comments. I read so many blogs and news feeds, I'd be lost without my feed reader, but it clearly also has its down side. I'm going to try to be a better blog visitor in future.

Hey advertizers! Check out SocialSpark

I think I'm going to enjoy being a member of SocialSpark.com. It's a very friendly, informal place, where members are treated with a great deal of respect. SocialSpark has plenty of decent, well-known advertisers, too. However, as it's a young site, I should imagine they could do with signing up a large number of new advertisers. I'm very impressed with the fact that the folks at SocialSpark have asked members which advertisers they would like to have sponsoring their blogs.

I would like to have a number of familiar brands sponsoring my blog posts. Before I get to naming some of those brands, I'd like to outline why I'd enjoy this kind of sponsorship. I probably don't make as much money as I could from sponsored blog posts, because I feel uncomfortable reviewing products or brands I'm not too familiar with. How can I honestly review something I don't know? Also, I like my sponsored posts to have some value for my readers, not just for my PayPal account. So if I'm blogging about something my general readership can relate to, the post sits comfortably alongside the rest of my blog, instead of sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb.

So what advertisers would I like to be sponsored by? I would have to go for well-known, global brands, because my readership comes from all over the world. I would love to write sponsored posts for Pepsi - my favourite brand of soft drink. Pepsi Max is divine, especially the lemon and lime flavour. As a lifelong chocoholic, I would also love the chance to be sponsored by Cadbury's. Or Nestle's. Or just about any major chocolate manufacturer. It would be the next best thing to free chocolate!

I'm also quite a geeky, computer sort of person, and would love to review software and gadgets for some of my favourite brands. One of my favourite applications is Apple iTunes. I also adore Adobe software, especially Adobe PhotoShop. One of my pet subjects is Internet security - I'm always telling people off for not having enough. So I'd also love the chance to be sponsored by computer security firms such as Grisoft, Lavasoft, Comodo and Checkpoint. It would give me the chance to nag people to improve their security!

I hope I get the chance to be sponsored by some of these great advertisers soon. Wish me luck!

Insulted!

I recently submitted this blog to SocialSpark. It got rejected. Guess why? They say that this blog contains no original content, and all its content appears to have been copied from another blog. I've had this blog for five years now, and I can honestly say that I have never EVER copied content from any other source. All my posts are 100% my own. I may feature the occasional LOLCAT image, but always with my own text. I have occasionally used a Creative Commons-licensed image from Wikipedia or Flickr, but that's because I have no other way of obtaining images of such things as the International Space Station or the Space Shuttle. I'm afraid my broomstick doesn't allow me to travel fast enough to keep up with them for a decent shot!

I suspect they've either made a mistake, and sent me someone else's rejection, or they think my old Blogspot URL, which can also be used to access this site, is a completely separate blog, and I'm an evil content thief who has stolen posts from that blog. It's the same goddamn blog!!!

I've never been called a content thief before :(. I feel highly insulted. I also feel very worried. Maybe some vile content thief has scraped the entire content of my blog and posted it elsewhere. Lazy people do this when they want to set up dozens, or even hundreds, of blogs, which they then monetise with Adsense, earning themselves a nice profit on the basis of someone else's content.

Please, dear readers, do me a big favour. If you come across any of my content on another blog/site, just leave a comment here, along with the URL of that site, so that I can get after the culprits. There are ways and means of dealing with people like that. That said, I've tried typing random excerpts from my blog posts into Google, and haven't found any other sites carrying my content. I just hope SocialSpark will take a good, hard look at their decision and realize they've made a huge mistake. Content thief, my butt ...

Blog experiment

I've adjusted the template slightly on this blog, so that my content now covers a wider area. It seemed silly to waste so much screen space. I've expanded the template by 100 pixels, which gives me a wider header wrapper, main content wrapper and sidebar. Hopefully, this adjustment will not cause display problems for anyone. But please let me know if you have problems viewing my blog, with the new template adjustments. I'm also experimenting with various Google ad formats. Please be patient with me as I tinker around with everything. In other words, humour me - I'm bored :).

I'm back!

Okay, I'm back, and that's official. I've finally wrapped my head around the fact that my laptop has totally died after 20 months of use. I've picked out a new one (more about that in a later post) - and it's most definitely NOT an Acer. Knickers to Acer! I have another £150 to save for it yet, so I won't be getting it until the end of June or the beginning of July. I've managed to retrieve all my data from the Acer, but for some reason, I can't copy any of it via the PC's CD drive. But not to worry. I'm going to hook up the external CDRW, as no internal CD drive has ever worked properly in this cranky old PC. I'll be virus scanning it all, and then all being well, I'll upload it to my Mediafire account. I've also got another free data storage account - Mediamax, I think - so in future, I'll be backing up my most important data online. I have so much, it'll be a pain in the bum to upload, even with broadband. I might wait until my speed is upgraded to 10 MB. Oh well, onwards and upwards ...

I'm still here!

I'm still here, folks. I haven't abandoned blogging - I've just been doing other things since my laptop conked out. This old computer is incredibly tedious, so it's not been my most inspired blogging month. I'm going to try to get back into it this week. But first, I have a crime to commit. Yes, that's right. I'm about to become a criminal!

It's looking more and more like the laptop has a nasty virus, rather than hardware failure. I can connect to the Internet with it for about an hour, but then, both network cards, wired and wireless, are disabled. I can't copy data to anywhere else on the computer, nor can I burn discs. I also have goodness knows how many corrupted files, plus the C drive seems to be filling up of its own accord. Worse yet, the My Documents folder is now inaccessible. I originally thought something had shorted out on the motherboard, thanks to a broken power connector pin. But with so many things going wrong, and the situation getting worse every time I turn the laptop on, common sense tells me this is a bug. Oh - and I can't get any antivirus software to scan the C drive in its entirety.

Okay, there is a slim chance this is still a motherboard issue. But I have to at least try reformatting the hard drive and installing a clean copy of XP. Trouble is, Acer didn't provide me with a Windows disc - it was pre-installed. Rather than rush out to buy a new copy of XP Home, I'm going to be naughty. I have a genuine XP Pro disc. However, it's a single licence copy - and that licence is already in use on my desktop. However, in order to ascertain whether or not I have an infected machine, or a major hardware failure, I'm going to install my XP Pro illegally on the laptop, and run it for a few hours, just to see if everything is okay. If the machine's problems are solved, I'll know it was a virus, and will happily buy a legal OEM copy of XP from eBay. I already have a valid licence for XP Home - it's printed on the bottom of my laptop.

If the same problems re-surface after a complete reformat and reinstallation, I'll know it's hardware failure, and will have saved myself the cost of buying a new XP disc. Either way, I'll only be running XP Pro illegally on the laptop for a few hours for evaluation purposes. Fingers crossed that this works. It certainly sounds like a virus, though why I didn't think of that in the first place, I really don't know. I just assumed hardware failure, because of the power connector issue. So please, wish me luck and pray that my laptop just needs some medicine, not major surgery.

Effing laptop!

First of all, my apologies for not visiting/commenting on other blogs as much as I would normally. Godzilla, my aged desktop, does everything VERY slowly, and being online is no fun at the moment. Also, I have to sit at my desk, which is not ideal, given my arthritic spine. Much of the time I am able to be online, is spent on researching how to build a laptop from scratch - which is what I will need to be able to do, if Lucretia needs a new motherboard. I will eventually repair her, but getting a new desktop is a priority, one that doesn't take at least 60 seconds to even think about performing any command it's given.

As for evil Lucretia, my freaky laptop, she's developed some new problems. The DVD/CD-RW drive is refusing to write any data to disk whatsoever. But Lucretia will have to go a lot further than that to defeat me. You see, I have an external CD burner, which is now happily burning my data to disc. Lucretia's C drive is also showing itself to be almost full. That's either a false report, as it had 7GB of space on it a few days ago - or I've got a virus, which has written billions of files to the C drive. That may explain why so many Windows system files are corrupted. Luckily, my data is on a separate drive. So when I've finally burnt it all to CD, Lucretia will be restored to her factory settings. If she still throws hissy fits, it's back to plan A - getting a new desktop. Ugh.

A bit stuck

Apologies to anyone who has come here looking for regular features, such as ABC Wednesday and Skywatch Friday. Most of my images are on my broken laptop, so when it comes to photo memes, I'm a bit stuck. I thought it was just the communications that were damaged on it, but it now freezes continually, so I may not be able to retrieve any data from it. Ugh.

Fighting Lucretia

I've been fighting all day with Lucretia. That's my (not so) pet name for my evil laptop. I've been knocked offline more times than YouTube in China. I've managed to buy myself a little time by taping the power cable to the body of the laptop. Well, I say 'taping', except I have no tape. So I've used the sticky labels I keep in a kitchen drawer for labelling spices, frozen foods, etc. At least I'm innovative. If the crew of Apollo 11 could fix a broken transformer with a ballpoint pen, what's wrong with me repairing my laptop with sticky labels? So, for as long as my sticky labels hold, I'm online. I'll be happy even if they hold just long enough to get the battery fully charged.

Sadly, I've missed Heads or Tails, which I fully intended participating in this week. I'd best prepare the rest of this week's memes whilst I have Lucretia up and running. I've also started a new weight loss blog. It's private at the moment, for my eyes only, just as a private log of my efforts, with a few helpful widgets in the sidebar. I may make it public. But not yet. Anyway, that's all for now. Sorry to be so boring. Blame Lucretia.

Goodbye Entrecard

I've decided to get rid of Entrecard. I just killed it on Strange Days, and will be removing it from this blog once Misty's ad has run. I guess it's a good idea for people who have time to constantly drop their cards, but I don't. Fair enough, it did boost my traffic, but how many of those new visitors actually bothered to stick around and read anything? I never saw any comments from any of them, and feel pretty certain that most new traffic from Entrecard was as a result of people visiting for two seconds, to drop their card and get their credit. That constant card-clicking is just too time-consuming, yet if you don't do it every day - you get penalized. Add that to the fact that the site is painfully slow and prone to multiple outages daily - I'm afraid it's just not for me.

I also don't like the fact that you can't delete your account. So I've removed the URL for Strange Days and added a link to a page that tells anyone clicking it that I'm no longer participating in Entrecard. I've also removed my widget. I'll be doing the same here in a couple of days, too. It's just too time-consuming for the small benefits it brings.

On the move

This blog will probably disappear for up to a day, at the beginning of next week. I'm switching it over to its own domain name, which will be http://sianiworld.co.uk. Switching over won't be instant, so this blog will be in limbo for a short while, and unavailable. However, once the switchover is complete, you can access it either with the new URL, or the old one. It means losing my Google page ranking again for a couple of months, but that should soon resolve itself. Subscribers should also not need to do anything, to continue to receive the feed. I'm changing nothing until Monday. Fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly!

The ads on this blog

I'm getting complaints about having ads on my blog. I've rejected a number of comments lately, which have included such complaints. Please let me make my position perfectly clear.

I have a minimal amount of ads at the top of my blog, which take up about the same amount of space, or less, than the average blog header images. One of the so-called ads is simply a graphic link to one of my other blogs, Strange Days. I think I'm allowed to promote my own work, right?

So far, my ads have earned me very little. Not even enough for a payout yet. But in a short while, they should reach payout level, and allow me to recover some of the costs associated with a couple of my online ventures.

I'm sorry if my ads offend some of you. But I only use Google and Amazon - nothing sleazy or disreputable. There are no porn pop-ups or banner ads booby-trapped with malware. It probably takes less than half a second to scroll past them. For those visitors who do consider them a severe annoyance - you should see some blogs and sites, with their flashing banners, Flash ads, squawking banners, etc.

Sorry if I sound a bit disgruntled, but this is my personal space, which I do my best to make as welcoming as possible. Although people are entitled to their opinions, I feel that the gripes about my minimal number of ads is not only unjustified, but a little out of order. Not all of us have the luxury of being able to work, or have a partner who supports us. Those of us who don't, have to make ends meet however we can. Anyway, enough said. I know most of you lovely people really couldn't care less about the ads, because they're far outweighed by original content. Thanks for listening :).

What's up with Blogger? Part 2

Please scroll down for Sky Watch Friday and Friday's Feast.

I forgot to mention something in my previous post. I received an email comment notification for another user's blog the other day. Luckily, I know Chris, and was able to contact him to let him know I'd received a notification for a comment posted to his Welcome to Gower site. That was the weirdest glitch of all. Oddly enough, Chris only lives a mile or two from me. It was odd enough that I got a comment notification for someone else's blog. It was doubly strange that it was a comment intended for someone I know, who lives nearby. What the fluff is up with Blogger?

What's up with Blogger?

Anyone know why Blogger is so messed up? First of all, the spellcheck function died. Several people have had blog layout problems. Also, Blogger users who have more than one sidebar, have lost the horizontal scroll bar in the layout screen, leaving their right-hand widget column chopped off, like this:

If all that isn't bad enough, I'm now getting error messages when I try to comment on other people's blogs - the dreaded '404 Page Not Found' message. Get your act together, Blogger, before I (and countless others) abandon you.

BTW, if you have a three column blog layout which has been cut off by the lack of a scroll bar, there is a workaround. You may not be able to click the edit buttons of the widgets in the right hand column, but you can still drag the widgets over to the left hand column. Once they're there, you can edit them like any other widget. Once done, return them to the right hand column and save your changes. A pain in the butt, I know, but at least it means you can still edit your layout, until Blogger sorts this mess out.

Slight change

Couldn't stand that vile pink a second longer. Whatever possessed me? Pink. Yeuch. Anyway, it's gone. I think the new colour scheme's much nicer - and kinder on the eyes. What do you reckon?