Pop along to Thanetmedia.com to have a look, although it’s early days and there is very little content.

In short this is a cheat code that the game developers Konami first put in a game in 1986 and since then it’s cropped up in quite a few places as a nod to popular culture.

Press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter key then anywhere you click will create a lens flare effect. To get rid of this all you need to do is refresh (5) the page and it will disappear. You won’t get a virus or anything, it’s just something the developers put in there for some fun.

If you also go into ’settings’ > ‘ account settings’ > ‘language’ you will now be able to change your language to ‘English (Upside Down)’ which does exactly what it says on the tin and another option is English (Pirate). To remove this you will have to go back into settings and change the language back to ‘English (UK)’.

Pirate Talk - Click to see full-size

I personally (that’s the nerdy bit of me) find it pretty cool that programmers still give these little heads ups so have a little play and amaze your friends.

I’ve just added a new Wordpress plugin called ‘Bird Feeder‘ which should automatically update my twitter feed with the post title and a shortened url. There’s only one way to try this out so consider this a test post.

Update: It works fine. At least now my twitter feed will be updated a little more often than it currently is.

I use my mobile for making calls and sending text messages, which is all I’ve really needed from a phone, but there is one thing extra that I want on my phone.. .a decent camera. The camera on the phone at the moment is rubbish and really low-res so it’s not even worth trying, and so on my new phone I’d like a good camera with at least 2 megapixels and a flash.

I want to be able to take photos wherever I am without the foresight of having to bring my main camera out, and having it on my phone would be ideal. I only really want to spend £100 maximum on the phone, but I don’t mind it being second-hand or refurbished, so get suggesting.

Obviously it would be nice if you could personally suggest a phone you currently use, but word-of-mouth suggestions are good too. Cheers.

I still get hits for “Andy.curran@persimmonhomes.com” (blog post here) along with others for Degaussing TV’s (blog post here) etc, and what this shows is that the posts I wrote were relevant and were found useful. That is good. I do however get a large amount of hits for completely random things that visitors will find no answer for on this blog. This is mostly due to the fact that I used to use song titles as the titles for posts when there was only a very tenuous link between the title and the content.

I get a lot of hits for “you and your friends in boxes of ten“, which is a lyric from Rosé by The Feeling which goes to this completely random post, and for some reason I am the top Google find for this. So for anyone looking for the lyrics then here they are:

The Feeling – Rosé

Oh I love ya
Especially today
Especially this way
Oh Rose
I want ya
Believe me this way
Rosé
I love your delicate way.

and here’s the video:

There’s quite a few other random search terms that crop up and maybe another day when I’ve got nothing to write about, much like today, I’ll go into those.

The first one is ‘Web Developer‘ which adds a new menu and toolbar to Firefox with a huge variety of tools to analyse and inspect web pages. To be honest, if you have any interest in web design then install it if you haven’t already, and you won’t understand how you coped before it. There’s too many features to list, such as displaying image sizes in little tags directly on screen at the click of a button, or even being able to alter CSS on any site live in the browser as you watch. Great stuff. Go install it and have fun.

The next extension is Greasemonkey, which in itself doesn’t do a great deal, but it does allow you to install scripts that make direct changges to the website you visit. Scripts can be downloaded from Userscripts.org and there are thousands of them, but a couple I’ve used lately have been Flickr Titles + Descriptions Batch Tools which adds a new option to the batch operations menu on the Flickr/organise page allowing this function which is strangely missing from Flickr, and has meant in the past that titles and descriptions have had to be entered manually for each photo which is sometimes a lot of work to do. The new uploader allows the bulk editing of titles and descriptions which is good, but once uploaded there’s no chance of editing the files as a whole. This extension fixes that.

As I mentioned, there are thousands (at last count 12,205) of scripts and so I did a little search for ‘Facebook’ to see what was on there, and so I stumbled across Facebook Ignore all application invitations link (above the right panel), which does at it says on the tin, and is great for getting rid of all those junk invitations for the applications your ‘friends’ have added. It’s the part that really annoys me about Facebook and so I feel a little better now and my Facebook page looks a lit cleaner. Don’t worry about missing out on important requests as group invitations, detail requests and any other type of request such as photo labelling are left and not touched. For those of you I know on Facebook, give it a try. I don’t have time to explore the other scripts for Greasemonkey but I’m sure there are some that once installed I won’t be able to live without.

These are just some Firefox extensions that I use but please feel free to tell me any you use and can’t live without.

So last week I went down to my old stomping ground at Chichester and had a very nice weekend. I was going down to see some friends who I haven’t seen since summer 2005, who were either just visiting or had moved back to the area, and I made the decision not to tell anyone else who I normally visit that I was coming down so that I could just concentrate on these friends as I wanted the weekend to be a bit different to what normally happens when I go down.

We drank, we ate food, we played pro evo, and we went clubbing in Bognor Regis to the wonder that is Sheiks Nightclub. I shouldn’t really call it Sheiks as it was rebranded as Club Vision was back in around 2002 but habits die hard and this was the place where I spent many a Thursday Night drinking too much, dancing my tits off, and then feeling ill….. oh what memories!

The memories did start flooding back, as they normally do on my visits, and it was nice to go to the club as I hadn’t been there since summer 2004 as I think three and a half years is probably a good enough gap to leave in between visits. I have to admit that I was a bit like an old man when I found out how prices had changed (or in fact how I’d perceived them to) such as paying £17 to get a taxi from Chichester to Bognor, or paying £7 to get in the club, or that my Sunday carvery at the Nags Head had now gone up to £10. In fact the prices hadn’t really gone up that much, it was just that my perceived reality was based on the memories stored in my head of how Chichester was and so along with this is the prices which surely had to rise over the years, as the prices have in my home town.

After the carvery on Sunday I went up to Uni to hook up with Jamie to join in a game of football on the top field, and ended up playing for a good couple of hours which surely must have burnt off some of the carvery. After that it was a long trip home in the dark back to Ramsgate and the following day I was back at work.

Going away for weekends is good fun, but you do feel exhausted at the end of them when you have to go to work.

So back to work and I toodled along during the daytime with ‘real’ work, and in the evening I cracked on with more websites. In the end I opted for the reseller package at HostGator as I think it should help me with websites in the future, but for the moment I’m going to have a huge amount of work to move over my current sites to the new accounts and get them fully up and running. In the end, all the sites will be on HostGator and I’ll be able to cancel my hosting with 1&1 and A Small Orange which simply didn’t suit my needs.

One website that I’ve already migrated is that of AmyHooper.co.uk which was less of a migration, and more of a complete rebuild (see the old site here). The site now runs on a CMS which means that it is easier to edit, and it’s also got its on individual account on my reseller space so it can now be considered completely separate. I’ll have to take it all a site at a time and eventually it will all be sorted. It’s probably a good time to give all the sites a spruce up and then I’ll be able to crack on with my own, knowing that I’ll have a completely clean slate.

That’s all for now…..speak laters

I’ve mentioned previously the limitations I’ve had with hosts, especially as most of the sites I built depend on MySQL, which is not supported very well with my current 1&1 account. I tried out Heart Internet which proved a wrong choice as unknown to me I couldn’t host multiple domains on the account which is pretty rubbish (read that post here) and so I quickly cancelled that, and soon I came across A Small Orange. I opted for the ‘tiny’ package as I was hoping to utilise the unlimited mySQL databases and link them into sites I host on my 1&1 account. wrong.

If you are having a single site on ASO then it’s fantastic, but there are incompatability issues with me linking to mySQL databases there from my 1&1, which is a bugger considering that was the whole reason for going over there. I’ve done plenty of reading up but haven’t found any real solutions and so I’m in a quandry again and my hosting accounts are in severe need of a good tidy up.

I’m coming to the conclusion that I may have to actually have to try some more hosting accounts and see if they fit the bill. I will have to sign up for a month which will be yet more money, but if I find a solution then I’ll be a happy man and it’ll be worth it.

I’m considering buying reseller hosting which will give me a lot more control over the sites I run and in the end make each account easier to manage as I’ll be able to customise what is available on each account and keep track of the bandwidth etc used by each site I run. It will also give me the opportunity to sell webspace to people if they need it as I can assign cpanels to all the accounts and specify what is available to each package(which will also help with income.)

The company I’ve been impressed with so far, and who I looked at a while back are HostGator and their reseller plan. It all looks very good, and as it’s a US company I should get a favourable deal due to the weak dollar ($24.95 a month / £11.82 in real money.)

If it all looks fine then I’ll set up the arduous task of moving all.. yes ALL…my sites over to it, and then cancelling the hosting with my 1&1 and ASO accounts so that everything is in one place. I will keep my domains hosted at 1&1 as they are very good for the .co.uk domains which I don’t think are available on HostGator, but that should make things a lot tidier.

Of course I will probably find a flaw with HostGator and have to switch over to somewhere else!

I think that if I really am serious about building websites then and see this as something longterm then I may as well bite the bullet instead of pissing around with cheap and cheerful solutions.

btw. I made a new site the other day as a favour to a friend (took only an evening to do) and you can see it here. It’s again built with websitebaker CMS and I’m quite happy with it. There are a few bits that might need to be fiddled with, but all-in-all it does the job.

I’ve also started work on my own site, but will have to put that on hold again if I do get the reseller account as it will change slighty. Also, if I get the reseller account a fair bit of time will be spend migrating accounts, so it’s not worth havign a site up offering webdesign if I don’t actually have the time to do it.

I passed my driving test (first time…just need to mention that) and was also off to University in the summer of 1999 and so I was given a phone as a present so I wouldn’t be out of touch. The thing was that text messages weren’t included on my phone as standard and were seen as an option for which I had to ring customer services to get them added on. At that time it was obviously viewed that not everyone would want them and the phone companies didn’t realise how big a deal texts would be… how wrong they were.

I never got into being a big texter though and will usually prefer to just give someone a call if I need to know anything as it’s cheaper, quicker, and straight to the point, although there are times when it is useful, in most cases when you really can’t be bothered or don’t need an instant reply, or (if memory serves me right) when flirting or making the initial steps into a relationship (if memory serves me right).

Mobile Phone operators must love text messages and they generally make 90% profit on SMS, and for the moment they are making a lot of money, but there are certainly much cheaper ways for people to text which will surely see the end of text messaging with the advent of phones with web capabilities (coupled with free wi-fi hotspots). For now they are safe, so keep on txting.