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Installed W3 Total Cache

26/10/2010 / / 0 Comments

I have added a new plugin, W3 Total Cache, to improve performance on this blog. It seemed that pages were taking a bit too long to load according to Google webmaster tools. Solutions for caching nearly always make a difference, but you have to be careful about the parameters you set. However, with minimal adjustment to the defaults on this plugin, I now have a working configuration. There are plenty of options as you can see with the whole new “performance” panel in my WordPress admin screen.

Slow loading pages can really turn visitors off. Most surfers have a very low attention span – until they’re captivated by something of course. Improvements in page loading speed have been shown to improve user engagement and site traffic on sites as diverse as Amazon, Google and travel websites. Blogs are probably not as important, but that only means that tolerances are wider. Just because everyone has higher speed internet access, doesn’t mean they want to wait any more than a second for a page to start displaying. I’ve seen a few blogs on rotation that are a bit slower than that. Make sure your blog loads progressively if you can’t reduce overall page elements easily.

Quotations, One Liners and a Birthday

14/10/2010 / / 2 Comments

I have whipped up a couple of new pages. These take advantage of content I already have in my database which currently is used on the homepage. First, the quotes which are randomly selected at the top of the page are now available as a list of quotations. Second, the one liner jokes right at the bottom of the page – careful, some are quite crude – are available as a list of one liners. Enjoy.

In other news, Nathan – my son – is five years old today. You can read the post on the day after his birth, or spin back two years to see his third birthday post. Happy Birthday Nathan.

Sitting in the Salon
Originally uploaded by simon_music

Troubleshooting WordPress Canonical

29/9/2010 / / 2 Comments

I have been wondering for a while why my jokes pages don’t list in search engines. They are WordPress pages which have some PHP in them to read from a separate database table containing my jokes. Every now and then I’ve tried to fix the problem, and I think I’ve finally found the issue. I’d like to explain how I didn’t solve the problem too, so you can see the troubleshooting steps I took.

First of all, I wondered if the content on the pages was too similar. I have a page that lists the categories for jokes, and for each link on that there is a page with a list of jokes in that category. I thought maybe the list of links wasn’t search engine friendly enough. So I added a bit of introductory text, and changed the <title> of each category list page to include the name of the category. I also added links to the next joke in the category on each joke page and changed the position of the breadcrumbs (e.g. Jokes by Category > True Stories jokes) to after the joke so the top of the page wouldn’t always contain very similar data. That didn’t work, but the pages are now a bit better to read and each joke in a category links to another joke which allows for better navigation. Perhaps people will read two or three jokes rather than being stuck in a dead end especially if they land on the site on a specific joke page.

Continue reading

New Workspace

19/9/2010 / / 2 Comments

Yasmina spent all today rearranging the stuff in the office at home. Interior decoration is a passion and an art, but it’s also a lot of hard work :). The simple idea of dropping the shelf down almost to the same level as the desk magically creates a nice huge L shaped desk. Stuff on the shelves has been re-arranged and a little bit of light deco added. Now it’s much nicer sitting surfing and working.

Maybe we should move the laptop to the right so that the two of us can be online at the same time in the same room. Or perhaps not. The laptop in the mezzanine has its advantages, including it being home to my vinyl collection.

New Workspace
Originally uploaded by simon_music

A Farmer Has Got a Song For You

9/9/2010 / / 4 Comments
Lycée Hilaire de Chardonnet

Recent reminiscence with friends on Facebook led me to dig out an old CD. The music on it is older than the CD itself, which was burned after copying tapes over from old recording sessions.

The story of this song began some time in 94-95 in Chalon sur Sa̫ne, where I lived for a year as an English assistant in a French lyc̩e (pictured). We did some busking there. I had a small room in an outbuilding of the school and we often jammed there, usually playing blues and making up words. The songs were full of private jokes and pointless Рoften lewd Рlyrics, improvised on the spot and recorded onto an old CD/tape combo box I had at the time. One or two songs survived those sessions and were revived in a later session, back in Letchworth, UK, probably in the summer of 95. The lyrics for this one had, for some reason, stuck around in our heads.

The track was put together with a keyboard backing, with a nice kind of fairground / harmonium organ sound playing cheesy thirds up and down. Paul played a rhythm guitar stab overdub and on the last chorus a second clean guitar was added while I randomly added a manual chorus/vibrato in real time with the tremolo arm a.k.a. “whammy bar” – you can hear it’s way out of tune at the end. We then overdubbed the solo – Paul playing incongruous distorted electric guitar – then each took turns layering in animal sounds (ahem) in the “farmyard break” before coming back to the chorus at the end. I sing the verses and Paul the chorus.

It’s not exactly a musical masterpiece, but it still makes me laugh. Friends at the time found it quite funny too, but then they were easily amused. Click the play button / song title below to hear it.

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Well hello and I’m a farmer…
Well hello there and my name’s Fred, and I live on a farm
I love organic fertilisers, and all their country charm
And I’ve worked hard all my life, and now I’m 92
So listen here* ‘cos I’ve got a song for you

Chorus
Sheep and dogs and dogs and pigs
And pigs and cows and cows and pigs
And geese and goats, and goats and geese on a farm
BSE and a HGV and a HGV and a JBC** and a JBC and little old me on me farm

Now I’m a farmer and I’ve got a wife
She’s the farmer’s wife, her’s the farmer’s wife
And she loves to cook in the farmhouse kitchen (lovely jubly)
And now I’ve got me combine harvester, and I’ve given her a name
Me combine harvester’s called Nelly

Chorus

Incongruous Solo – Farmyard break – Chorus

*The tape suffered an accident – the erase protection tab hadn’t been snapped out of the tape, and someone accidentally hit record instead of play on the line marked with the first asterisk. I have added back the same part from the second verse to preserve continuity but you can see it’s a dodgy fix. No surviving mix of the full song is known to be extant.

**Yes, we realised very quickly it was JCB and not JBC.

Another French strike

6/9/2010 / / 0 Comments

The French need some kind of pension reform. The current French state budget is seriously in the red at roughly 7.5% of GDP last year, well outside European norms. France have a policy of statutory retirement from the age of 60, for men and women. This is already more advantageous than the UK where it has been at 65 for men, 60 for women since I can remember – and now seems to be indexed on the number of qualifying years.

Of course the unions are all out on strike tomorrow with most complaining in simple sound-bites about how everyone will have to work longer before retiring whilst conveniently ignoring the massive budget deficit, increasing life expectancy and the fact that state pensions are a pittance anyway. Far better to invest in a private pension in order to retire early, instead of living – though the state hardly sets a good example – beyond your means and hoping that as soon as you’re 60, the state will provide because it doesn’t and won’t.

The strangest thing is the way the media seems to be managing pension reform. I’ve heard people close to retirement age call in to radio stations with invited politicians on a panel and complain they will now have to wait longer to get their pension. These people will in fact be unaffected by the new pension plans which will not come into force fully until 2018. The roll-out will be on a sliding scale – those born in 1950-1956 will not be required to work a full further 2 years to get statutory pensions. Even then, there is also a system of qualifying years (41 for France compared to 44 for the UK). On top of all that, the French system indexes pensions on earnings in the last years before retirement, whereas the UK system is indexed on contributions. Did anyone on the panel explain this to the caller? The responses sounded rather obfuscated to me, with debate on how they might define exceptions to the rules and other information which played on the complexity of the reform rather than serving it in palatable doses.

Other major differences include when you qualify for any kind of pension – in the UK there are “basic” and “additional” pension requirements. In France there’s a notion of “full” pension at 65 for men, but a plethora of exceptions for state workers, and those who have physically demanding jobs.

From my point of view the big failure of the French state is that Nicolas Sarkozy is increasingly seen as an elitist with a xenophobic agenda. He certainly does not suffer fools gladly and seemingly has nobody in his party willing to explain properly the ramifications of his needed reform. Corruption and nepotism has been quite visible too, but then the UK can hardly say it’s any better in that respect. So we’re set for a drawn out program of strikes just so someone might deign to make sense of the situation. Instead of which the system will become so complex that nobody will be able to understand it, and everyone will have lost. You still won’t be able to retire at 60 – or 65 – on a decent income anyway.

[edit]: Comment from a friend on Facebook :

The French should not be allowed to retire until they have made up all of their strike days. I think a two year extension is generous!

Strike Action Causes Crowded Platform
Originally uploaded by simon_music

Five Years, Still Here

5/8/2010 / / 0 Comments
Thumbnail of old WordPress CMS back office look

The first proper post on this blog, discounting some emails about the Tour de France fantasy game which I converted to blog format, was Reading For Free back in late July 2005. I started the blog on WordPress and am still running it (back then it was version 1.2 and then 1.5). I created my own theme in September with help from Urban Giraffe and have modified it a bit since then, adding widget support (very late on that one, but didn’t need it before), tweets in the sidebar, and most recently a mobile version.

I have just upgraded to the latest version (3.1). The dashboard and back office looks cleaner, and has come a long way from the way it used to look. Sadly my post frequency average is only about 2 posts a month, which means my audience is still very limited. If you can’t post at least once a day, you’ll never build up readership – though once you have your readers, you might be able to diversify and post regularly but not necessarily to the same blog. I’ve spent five years hoping I could find more time to say more, still hoping.