I'm still here (a different here)

For those of you who may have thought I had expired in the tumult of removals and starting theological college, fear not! We landed safely in Cambridge and are starting to settle in. Moving house was hard, and since arriving in Cambridge, I have barely had a minute to spare. First with house decoration, and then the start of the Westcott induction programme; it's been a bit of a roller-coaster. Things are starting to settle now, and I will have some more time over the next few days, so yo may hear a little more from me. The only complication is that Sky are still working on connecting our house to the information superhighway, so my only internet access is in my study in Westcott.

That's all for now. Come back soon if you're interested in a more detailed analysis of the last couple of weeks. I'll try to get something up tomorrow.

No-one loves me (or so I thought)

When I first set up this blog, I decided I would keep track of visitors using the wonderful (and free) Google Analytics service. This has provided lots of wonderful information about how many visitors the site gets, and even where the visitors have come from. It tells me geographical information as well as data about referring sites. I find I can spend ages wondering who from Japan might have visited my blog!

I was a bit put out, then, when my latest visit to the site told me that I have only had one visitor per day for the last week! I'm not claiming that the blog gets millions of hits, but it's rare that I get only 1 visit in a day. So I began to piece together the facts of the situation... What happened on the blog about a week ago that might have affected the link between my blog and analytics? Hmmm... Might it be a change in the template, which resulted in the loss of a few lines of HTML code? Might those lines of code be responsible for getting the information to Google? Indeed.

I think I have fixed it now, so my ego will be restored when I check tomorrow and find that my thousands of regular readers haven't actually deserted me. Unless they actually have, and it's just a coincidence that I changed my template.

Time for a change

Having come across a couple of new blogger-based blogs lately, I wondered where they had got their exciting templates from. Then I had a rummage on the dashboard and found a whole batch of new templates. This is one of them. Not sure about it yet - what do you think? An improvement or not? Please comment.

As I thought

Thanks to Ministry for this from the BBC. It seems that I was correct in my assumption that 118800 cannot handle the number of unsubscribe requests.

New look for the Blackburn Diocese website

Occasionally I call in on our Diocesan website to keep abreast of news and developments. Imagine my surprise when I found that after years of the same gaudy template, we have a swanky new look!


I haven't had the chance to check out the navigation or the content yet, but it does look much better than it did!

A very popular website

Those of you who read my earlier post and thought you would go and tell 118800 that you don't want your number to be included in their venture will have found the same thing I have:
I'm guessing that the company's servers are struggling to keep up with the demand for people opting out rather than people wanting to use their services. Either way, 118800 seems to be unavailable at the moment. Please try again later.

Wise words of caution for web users

Phil Cooke has an interesting post on extracting urine from swimming pools! He reckons that taking something off the internet is like taking pee out of a pool; referring particularly to people having trouble getting jobs because of the dodgy stuff they've put on Facebook. Once its posted, you can't really unpost it!

Surprise package

I love this clip from 'Britain's got talent'! I'm not a fan of the music; I dislike most music from musicals, and indeed most musicals! The thing that I like about this, though, is that it demonstrated on prime time TV that you can't always judge a book by its cover. I like the fact that everyone was completely surprised by her ability.

It has to be said, though, that the majority of 'talent' on display on such TV shows amounts to nothing more than car-crash TV. The producers know they are going to get a large number of unoriginal and uninteresting 'talents', and that's why people watch - for the cringingly bad bits, not for the genuine talent.

Astronomical phenomenon

There are some great photos on the BBC website of the heavens smiling down on us.

Classic photographs on the web

The internet uber-brand Google seem to have done it again! If you appreciate classic photography, you need to take a look here. I've only had a quick look, but a load of great pictures are on there.