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Crush It! – A Blogger’s Review

“What, another one?”

At the TBU Conference a couple of weeks ago, the inestimably sage John O’Nolan of the WordPress UI team suggested we all read a particular self-help book.

Regular readers – hey, allow me my illusions – will know my relationship with self help books is an uneasy one. But (a) John clearly Knows Stuff, and (b) hey, another book on the pile can’t hurt. So I went to Amazon, found the Kindle edition was on special offer, and one click and £4.49 later, I’m reading about a guy conquering the world with a wine-tasting video blog.

I dearly hope you just followed that last link, and watched Gary Vaynerchuk doing his thang. If you’re anything like me, after 10 seconds of intro your first reaction is “euww“. He’s a showman, in the brash, nervy, wildly gesticulating fashion so characteristic and so lampoonable with web TV shows. And I hope you remained like me enough to keep watching beyond that intro, to the point where you realised this is a smart, genuine bloke who (past the ludicrous introduction) is simply being himself in front of the camera. Especially at the end. It’s hard to not respond to that kind of authenticity.

Ditto his book, Crush It: Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion. (more…)

TBU ’11: A List Of Top Non-Tens

In the style of ieatmypigeon. With a dash of mobilelawyer-style list-hatred. And a dollop of laziness, because 10 is way too huge and my life is short.

Last Sunday I attended the second day of the Travel Bloggers Unite 2011 Conference in Manchester. I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of person that does things by halves, and this was no exception.

(Actually I was busy on Saturday, but it’s a good joke for no extra cost, so just shut the hell up).

Here are some lists of things I encountered during my time there. And because I hate top ten lists, these aren’t. (more…)

What Are Blog Comments For?

It’s all in the comments, folks.

Right, You’re Bannered

One thing about switching to Ravi Varma‘s WordPress template, as clean and white as a Greek wall in Plato’s head,  is that I get to play with the banner.

Every time you refresh the page, you should see a new banner image. Except, not so much with the “new” thing right now: a few stock photo that came with the template, and a few of my own, namely:

  • A blustery day on the seafront at Hornsea
  • The view from Nafplio’s Palamidhi fortress
  • The patchwork green of Northumberland emerging from cloud
  • Shots of Athens and the Acropolis catching the waning sunlight

I’ll be adding at least a couple of new ones a day, gradually giving you a 920-by-150-pixelled window into my past.

No need to thank me, it’s not a favour – especially when I reach my photos of Hull.

Where Did It Go?

Good question.

You may remember there was a blog here called Fevered Mutterings (v3), packed to the rafters with wibblings. Well, yesterday I realised I hadn’t archived it properly. So I went into my webspace to do just that.

It involved moving files around into one folder, so I could export that folder onto my laptop for archiving. When I did so, WordPress seems to have automatically tried to “fix” my blog – which involved installing blank versions of my content files over the top of them. In other words: it’s all gone. Years of it.

There’ll be a lot of broken links out there. Blimey.

I know, yes, absolutely, I should have done this and I should have done that. There’s a way of exporting all your work as an .xml file. Yes, I’m aware. But I had no idea that this ‘live’ webspace would try to correct itself while I was working in it – otherwise I would have been around forty thousand times more careful. I would probably have left well alone until I had memory sticks bulging with every scrap of writing.

But I didn’t and I don’t, and now it’s all gone.

deletekey

Contrary to what you might think…no, I’m not in the depths of a whisky bottle right now. I was archiving the site because I wanted to reboot it, so change were already in the air. And I’m not too precious about most of the writing I’ve done for fun. If I wrote it, it’s still in my head somewhere, so it’s a chance to write some of my favorite posts for the second time. And it’s a chance to start as I meant to go on from the start last time – if that’s not too tortuous a sentence.

So, welcome to Fevered Mutterings version 4: less bugs, more stuff, and far more stable. You’ll see.

Image: djking

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