One To Watch

Maybe

http://bastarddriver.wordpress.com/

Let me clue you in, I’m on the loose, and I’m a real Bastard. I don’t particularly care about your feelings, nor do I care that my little version of the truth might piss you off, or make you cry. I don’t care about your ego, or how hard you worked to find the right “quote” to put me in my place.

Well, I’m not gonna “put you in your place”, you’ve had your blog for 10 days and haven’t actually said anything yet!

I like reading rants and I hope you live up to my expectations…

You’re going on my blogroll just for good measure.

Give Me Fuel, Give Me Fire, Give Me Adsense I Desire

Yeah, ok it’s a bad rewrite of a fantastic Metallica song, but it seems appropriate at the moment.

Want to get the wp.com community fired up? It’s really easy, just mention Adsense. It would seem that there are five threads running on the forum about the same thing.

There was a new (posted to today by both Matt and Podz) thread about the same thing but it would appear that it has been deleted.

Now, personally I hate the thought of advertising on blogs. I go to a blog to read the blog, not have the reading interrupted by an ad for something potentially completely irrelevant. I like the wordpress.com policy on no ads, it will keep sploggers and ad blogs off wordpress.com. I entirely agree with the current policy, and where it refers to advertising such as Adsense that’s cool.

In the deleted forum thread, someone (poppy8sd I think) tried to call out Scoble for having links to his books for sale at Amazon and Barns & Noble. Oh dear. Can’t cope? Want it that much? Write a damn book!

Of course, if having advertising means THAT much to you, cough some of your pennies, get hosted and run your own WordPress. I believe Matt said something similar.

That said, Lorelle pointed out this announcement about

contextual adsense test tonight on WordPress.com to see if it’s worth investigating or not.

Matt says they are investigating it as a way to “keep the lights on”. There is much more to the post than that so I suggest you go read it.

That’s fine Matt. If you give people adsense or other advertising you’re gonna get the sploggers.

Want my suggestion? Keep the free services running without advertising. Create a payment scheme that will offer subscribers facilities such as advertising, more themes (maybe with more control over CSS, although, I think that’s a recipe for disaster!), more widgets, and some other Gucci features that I can’t think of right now. Something I did see the other night is Canvas. That gives users control over colours, themes and layout without needing HTML/CSS access. Perhaps that could be investigated as a “paid” feature, or at least something similar.

It will help pay for the server uptime, give the users that are shouting about it most what they want and will still keep the sploggers at bay.

Until then – The wordpress community should stop bitching and whining about what they can’t have for free and celebrate what wordpress.com does give them for free:

Secure blogging.

Excellent support.

Widgets.

Mostly great themes.

Security.

Regular new features.

No requirement to know CSS and HTML/PHP for those that just want to write.

Dr Mike – Support Guru

Security.

Fantastic uptime. Due mostly to security.

Podz

Oh, did I mention security three times in the same list? Can’t think why. Oh, hang on, yes I can. No Javascript ability to screw it up like on Blogger or MySpace.

So, stop bitching, stop whining, enjoy what you’ve got and go write something!

Update: I was reading back through one of the many threads on the subject and Podz put it just beautifully:

Here you get
- a free blog
- free hosting
- free bandwidth
- free support
so I think you should appreciate that as it says in the FAQ we do not want this site to turn into some sort of adfest where people pimp the forums even more just to get traffic just to get clicks. We don’t want people yelling that they want better placement, different ad sizes, conditional displays. We don’t want them complaining that they want another companies ads. We don’t want them complaining that all they get as ads for blogs. We don’t want people setting up masses of blogs purely to generate an income (“Please can you make it so when I post to one blog it auto posts that to my other 41 …”).

This site, believe it or not, is for blogging.

Saying what you do elsewhere with wordpress software gets you precisely nowhere – in fact it may even take you back a step.

And in case you hadn’t taken marc’s hint – be polite around here please.

(And never assume anything about me or anyone else.)

You’ll need to read the start of the thread to understand the last two sentences, but I think I would be a little insulted about being told

So you are anti capitalist communist? I have a ton of adsense on one of your Word Press applications on another server now!

Well done “Chip Langford” you seemed to piss most of the community off with just those two sentences!

Update 2: Matt May be testing ads, but he also says:

Also I don’t like the idea of people blogging for money. Blog because you love writing, blog to communicate, blog because you can’t do anything else. Don’t blog just for profit, it’s too personal to sell it so cheaply.

Amen Brother!

My Sick Colleague

So, you phoned in sick this morning. Woop-de-do.

Oh, you’ve got the runs? Oh dear.

I really can’t see what the problem is. It’s 25 feet from your desk to the toilet and as you don’t do any fucking work when you’re here and just sit at your desk, it’s not a long walk is it?

Let’s do a quick analysis of your work for Monday and Tuesday:

You updated your CV. Twice.

You moaned about the heat.

You spent two hours looking at the BBC News website

You whinged about the amount of calls in the queue

You checked the internal jobs advertisments.

You whinged that you were ineligible to apply for any of them.

You fucked off at 1530 when you knew damned fine it was my privilege yesterday.

You phoned in sick this morning.

What a great start to your working week. Wanker.

Wank’s A Girl!

The owner of WordPress Wank is of the feminine persuasion. With the way that he she writes, and the name (I know, it’s a nickname, but still!) I naturally assumed that Wank was a guy.

I imagined (I’m sorry Wank!) some 6 foot bloke with a slight beer belly, shoulder length ragged (think Otto from the Simpsons) hair and a goatee or at least a patchy, two week old unshaven style beard, sitting poring over the wp-forums and laughing while Podz says “fuck it“!

Well, the truth is out!

Respekt!

Scrolling Through the sidebar

I popped in to the wordpress.com forum to see if there was anything interesting in there.

Unfortunately it’s just the same old same old:

Why can’t I edit themes

Why isn’t my animated plain text stat counter banana widget working

Why does every theme on wp.com suck

You know the type of thing.

Anyhow, this thread caught my attention. Not because it’s an interesting question, it isn’t. It’s one of those like above with just enough information to get people to look at the blog and see absolutely nothing useful.

Except the sidebar. I have a standard MS scrolling mouse, you know the ones that click when they scroll. Now, one complete movement of the wheel is 6 clicks. I had to scroll 7 times. I have the wheel set to scroll three lines per click. Look out, it’s Math time:

6 clicks * 7 complete scrolls = 42 clicks. 42 clicks at three lines per click = 126 lines.

Yep, approximately 126 lines in Sonia’s blogroll. DAMN!

Don’t believe me? Go Look! I am sure that every widget available on wp.com is in that sidebar, along with five empty boxes. Please please please do something about it. I didn’t even bother trying to look at what was there!

And, breathe…

Someone Broke The Dot Com Forum!

Messages posted -1 year ago? Hmm!

A Different Type Of Spamming

Blog hopping this afternoon revealed Cornell’s Blog Review. Whilst a little slow at updating with new reviews, Cornell seems to have some willing participants. I may submit later, but not yet.

What has caught my eye though is the spam comment on the Submit page.

Shoot My Blog is asking readers to take a photo of the blog and email it to the author. Certainly an interesting idea, it’s still spam though!

Welcome To SUA!

You may already have read on the right that Swindon Underground Airport is currently having issues with the amount of available space around the main runway. Unfortunately this is a permanent state and it’s unlikely that it will ever be fixed.

Therefore we are here to entertain with stories, crap jokes and other funny shit, geek opinion and rants and anything else that may or may not interest either me or you. This will be most likely turning into a rant site. As Timethief says, everybody needs somewhere to howl at the moon. This is my site.

So, welcome! My name is Jimbo. I have NOTHING to do with the TV series of the same name, it just serves to hide my true identity. I run four other blogs, two of them on wordpress.com. I will not publish a personal email address on here yet, although I may in time set up a gmail account for you to contact me if you wish. If you have something to say, please leave a comment. More often than not I will respond, if it’s really special I might even reply by email. Check back regularly, updates will be sporadic at best, hourly at worst!

If I enjoy this then I might launch the blog on its own domain, but I don’t know yet.