blogging


Support your local Spinneyhead

I know that a lot of you buy stuff from amazon. It pains me to have to say it, but none of you seem to go through spinneyhead to get there.

Next time you want to go on a book buying binge spare a thought for a poor struggling blogger and come here first. I’ll even put up a direct link to the home page so all you have to do is click.


Bad blogging tech weekend

This is a test to see if I can still blog by email.

Two pictures I sent from the phone yesterday haven’t shown up at Flickr, let alone spinneyhead. Blogger itself refuses to post anything, irrespective of server and the video blog I did for Presents won’t upload.

I’m going to sulk for a while, then try again later, starting with checking whether this arrives.


Around Spinneyhead

Adrift– Page 1 published on Monday (after a slight cock up where it fell through a wormhole and was briefly published in April 2005). Page 10 rendered and lettered. The last few pages have been quite processor intensive render wise, involving about a dozen lights and a lot of elements. There’s one more page in that location then it’s back to the simple one light, one dead guy in a space suit deep space renders.

Tiger– not a lot of progress on the layouts this week. I ahve been messing around with an arts package called ArtRage that Clare bought for me, learning how to use it by working on backgrounds for the early pages. I’m going to be away from the computer for a while this weekend and I’ll try to use that time to get some more layouts done.

Spinneyhead’s archives- I’m trying to republish them all, but, Blogger being Blogger, never get much further than 10% completed. As I remember stand out posts, ones which garnered search engine traffic, I’m republishing them.

How to Save the World for Free- as detailed below, 2 Wheels Good has gone over to the Green side. Dig and Digest will follow at some point. It just makes sense to group those blogs together. I may also start sub-directories dedicated to solar panels, bio-diesel etc. to maximise earnings from the subjects.

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MEN – "Net blogger must pay £10,000"

Be careful what you say in a chatroom, especially if you’re inclined to accuse a Parliamentary candidate of being a sex offender and a racist bigot. Tracy Williams, from Oldham, made just such a claim about Michael Keith-Smith who fought the Portsmouth North seat last year for the UK Independence Party and has been fined £10,000 for it.

He’s a UKIP member.

Who likes to sue people for things they say about him online.

But he’s a UKIP member.

I think my head’s going to explode.

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ghost town

The rest of the team are away for the day getting marriage counselling (or, at least, the business equivalent from someone who also specialises in marital strife) leaving me all alone in an open plan sea of empty desks. Maybe i should have gone along. I thought i was going to be busy today but it looks like i misread the timetable for this week’s job and i’ve actually got nothing to do.

I could probably do with some career counselling given that i’ve reached the age of thirty five and never had a real job. All the headlines about looming pension crises have me worrying about the uncertain future.

I’m quite good at something that pays well but only offers career advancement into management, which i’d hate and be bad at. Sadly i’m not specialised enough. I’d love to spend my time data wrangling, spotting trends and producing pretty geo-demographic maps, but noone’s going to ask me to. Plus there’s the whole thing with me not being built for office life, which makes even a good day more stressful than necessary.

The spinneyhead weblog empire is an attempt to escape the office, but it’s not yet generating enough income to be called anything other than a self financing hobby. I keep a graph of the rolling thirty day average income for the last year. The trend line is currently climbing quite spectacularly, and looks great until you check the peak values. On the one hand two dollars a day buys me the americano i wired myself with this morning. On the other, if the trendline continues on its current trajectory i’ll be into double figures by the end of january and able to call myself a pro blogger by march. I can dream.

Today is going to drag horribly. I think i’ll try to leave early.


As featured in City Life

Manchester’s premier listing magazine gets on the blog train, with an article by an eminent mancunian blogger and featuring yours truly. I’ve been putting together an introduction to Spinneyhead that will be posted later today. It would have gone up yesterday, but the flu meant I spent most of the day in bed.

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reception

reception
reception,
originally uploaded by spinneyhead.

Given that there are some rooms in my parent’s house where there is no reception it’s still easier to post by mobile than to use the land line. Next time i visit there should be broadband.

Is anyone else having trouble viewing spinneyhead in internet exploder? The content isn’t appearing until the bottom of the sidebar, just like when blogger started messing around with floats. Only, as far as i can tell whilst the computer can stay connected, i haven’t changed any of the relevant settings.

Ah well, i will investigate when we get back to manchester.
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Tinker

With thanks to Stephen Newton my Blogger inflicted formatting woes have been partially fixed. IE, at least, now doesn’t show huge whitespace after the first post (on my computer anyway, contact me if it’s still screwed on yours).

Update Blogger are responding to the problem, sort of.

(I promise I’ll go over to WordPress one day. But if I want to port across all of the archives I’ll have to wait until Blogger is sufficiently fixed to be able to update all my archives without crashing………)


Which?

My parents are about to join the broadband revolution. Their local exchange is wired for sound and they’ve just got to decide who to have as a provider. BT would be the obvious choice, but I’d like to hear from you if you can think of a better ISP.

Maximum speeds and download limits are unlikely to be an issue. Price and overall reliability and service are the most important factors.

(You’ll notice that the comments have changed. Backblog has been experiencing problems that have resukted in the page taking far too long to download. So I turned it off and have gone over to Blogger comments instead.)

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Burnt out on asbestos

Earlier this year a blogger called Michael Buffington started a pecialist blog on asbestos. The idea was to see how lucrative niche blogging could be, because lawyers were paying big bucks to put their Google ads on asbestos related sites as the lawsuits are money spinners. The experiment seems to be over. The lesson seems to have been that if you’re going to aim for a niche, make it one your interested in. Which just gives me a chance to say that all the Spinneyhead special subject blogs are about things that interest me or get me excited, even if they seem at odds with the main blogs slightly twisted character.

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Business Plan

A couple of weeks ago, whilst on my Bullshit to Work course, I wrote a business plan for professional blogging. there was nothing else to do. I’ve just typed it up and it’s the new Cycling on the Pavement. Any input welcome, particularly from anyone who is an actual professional blogger.

A couple of things have changed. I haven’t received a reply from the company that makes model Tardis’ and I have a job, so a full day’s work at the blogface is no longer possible.

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