Introduction To Wordless Wednesdays

The more eagle-eyed of you will have noticed that yesterday’s post was a little different from the usual offerings here on Textual Relations. After some recent feedback, Mr President discontinued Wiki-Wednesday. When he thought of his options for its replacement, he decided he still wanted Wednesday posts to fit with the ebb and flow of the week. Wednesday is hump day, after all.

When he started Wiki-Wednesday, he liked the idea of a “lighter” post. His content could be rather dry and serious at times and Wednesdays are dour days enough as it is. What good could come of yet more depressing stuff to encounter every Wednesday? Naturally whatever replaced the Wiki-Wednesdays would have to conform to this.

Wiki-Wednesday had actually failed to do so. In the end “random” topics only meant that the content was often dry and dull, and only rarely interesting. So what did this blog lack that could fulfill this criteria? What could be added that be “uplifting”?

The answer was simple. Textual Relations needed visual stimulation.

Every Wednesday there will be a new photograph to raise your spirits.

Leechblock Is A Lifesaver

Facebook is a great thing. It is also incredibly distracting. Nor is it the only site that seems to leech time away like there is no tomorrow. YouTube. Discussion forums. Wikipedia. There is a distraction around every corner of the web ready to suck you in and make you lose track of time. This is not a minor issue either, time is the most valuable commodity any of us possess yet we waste it.

Does this sound familiar? You get a block of time to catch up on things that you need to do, whether it’s household tasks or something for work. Say a weekend which you have already earmarked to do tasks which you didn’t have time for during the week. It starts well, you wake up late (it is the weekend after all), make some coffee or tea.

You sit down in front of your computer. Check your mail. Decide to “pop into” Facebook to check your messages Before you know it, four hours have passed, and all the stuff you’d planned to do can’t be done because it is getting late. There is hardly much time left in the day and you kick yourself for falling into the trap of teh internetz.

We’ve all done it. Well salvation is here. Leechblock is willpower in a bottle*.

*Note, it’s not actually in a bottle because fluids and computers don’t mix.

Wonderful WordPress Saves The Day

Thanks to WordPress, having an active social life need not stop you blogging. Without the ease with which he was able to pre-publish today’s blog post, you might have had to all do without his pearls of wisdom. Quite how you would have managed nobody knows.

Fear not, though, for here is today’s post. It’s as if he’s in two places at the same time. Which hopefully won’t cause damage to the spacetime continuum or anything like that.

After the recent slump in reader participation Mr President is concerned that you might all be losing interest in his littler corner of the internet. Despite not being one to bow to public pressure he is a man of the people, and wants you to be happy.

With that in mind he’d like some feedback. What would you like to see more of? What do you like about the blog? Is there anything at all you’d like to see less of?

Apple And WordPress Sitting In A Tree…

Just in case you needed another good reason to get an iPhone or an iPod touch (Mr President wants both) those lovely folk at WordPress have given you one. If you have a WordPress blog, chances are you’ve seen this already, but for those who haven’t, you’re about to get very excited. In fact you might want to put a newspaper down to take care of the mess you might leave on the floor.

Ready? WordPress now has an app for the iPhone and iPod touch! Blog while you’re out and about. Next time you see something you think would make good blog material, just sit down with your swanky new Apple gadgetry and post it. Never again will you have to think “That’ll make a good blog post. Better remember to write about that.”

It’s one small step for WordPress…one giant leap for Blog-kind. Sort of.

What’s With All The Spam?

Spam (no, not that kind of spam, the other one) has been the bane of almost all Internet users since its inception. The inception of the Internet, that is, not spam. Although those are practically the same thing. Every single one of you reading this now (yeah, all three of you) will have encountered spam before, in fact you probably encountered it today.

Of course this shouldn’t surprise us. Every time we invent something it’s simply a matter of time before a shrewd business sees a way to make money out of it. Some might even say (and Mr President would be one of these) that this is the way things should be in a Capitalist society. It is, after all, this behaviour that has made us such a great species.

Thanks to spam filters getting better at catching it, it’s not as instrusive as it used to be, but that really only poses the question why it still exists. If spam is not seen by a human it serves no purpose, so why bother with spambots at all? Not only does it not work as a means of advertising but it is now purely an annoyance. What good does that do?

Given its impotency, the rising amount Mr President receives is baffling. Whether it is via email or blog comments, not a day goes by when he isn’t accosted by a number next to the “spam” counter. He could ignore it but the problem with trusting the spam filters is that over-automisation leads to some important things slipping through the cracks.

What about you, have you noticed an increase in your spam counts? What do you do?