Category Archives: Articles

How to Pickle Samphire

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Samphire is an Edible Coastal plant that is rich in Vitamin C.

Samphire has a very short season, is generally available between July and August and is best eaten before it flowers. It can be eaten as part of a salad but also tastes great when pickled. Pickling also provides a method for long life storage.
There are several ways of pickling Samphire buy here’s the simple process that I followed:

1. Wash a pickling jar in hot soapy water and rinse well.

2. Sterilise the pickling jar by placing it in a pan of boiling water for 10 mins.

3. Carefully Wash the samphire and cut it into 2 inch sections if required.

4. Blanch the Samphire in boiling water for 1 min.

5. Rinse the Samphire under cold water.

6. Place the samphire into the picking jar.

7. Cover the samphire in pickling vinegar, you can mix your own but you can use pre-made pickling vinegar.

8. Stick a note of the date on the jar.

9. Leave the jar in a dark cool place for 3 months to pickle.

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A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 4 Article Directories

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A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 4 Article Directories

Part 1 Using Twitter can be found here.

Part 2 Using Discussion forums can be found here.

Part 3 Face Book can be found here.

Part 4 Article Directories.

Article Directories are websites that catalogue and host large numbers of articles on various topics. A good source of information for readers search on specific topics, the main Article Directories try and guarantee good quality in documents by setting various rules on submission and checking each article manually.

The top Article Directories are very popular and receive thousands of hits per day, and because Article Authors tend to link back to the directories they have a high Google Page Rank.

There are 2 potential ways to use Article Directories to increase the amount of traffic to your site, but both require you to write a high quality article on the same\similar topic to your site.

I can recommend these articles Directory Sites:

After you identify which sites you are going to submit articles too, check out the sites rules and policies carefully to make sure that your document stays within their guidelines, and write a unique article for each site, making sure to check your spelling and the sites minimum number of words per article.

The first way to increase traffic to your site is to put a link to your site in the articles, each site will have different rules about placing links but most will allow a link in an information box at the end of the article.

In the information box place a sentence about where to find more information about the subject and a link to your site. Readers will find your article within the directory and then follow the link back to your site.

The second way to increase traffic to your site is through improved Google Authority, if you link back to your site within the article using key words that you want to rank highly for, then you have a better chance of ranking higher for those key words in Google. For example if you ran a website on Dog Coats and you wanted to rank highly for the search term “Dog Coats” then use that term as a hyperlink to your site.

Make sure you submit a different article to each site and submit several articles to each site for your keywords and you should notice that you start ranking higher in Google.

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Virgin Media to re-launch TIVO in the UK – Welcome back to an old friend

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Virgin Media have recently announced that they are going to launch a TIVO service to their customers in the UK.

TIVO is a highly sophisticated PVR (Personal video recorder) which allows the recording of Multiple TV channels at the same time as well as traditional Time Shift functionality, but it’s the quality of the software which sets it’s self apart from the competition. TIVO’s are easy to use and in addition to  manual programming will learn what type of programs you like to watch, and if the box has the capacity will automatically choose and record programs that it thinks will interest you.

Virgin Media will provide every TIVO box with it’s own 10mb broadband connection, so that it won’t eat into your Internet experience, this is required as Virgin Media are integrating their TV on Demand service into the TIVO box allowing EPG access to a 7 day  archive of programs for several channels, so even if you forget to record a program you will be able to watch it

The TIVO PVR brand has been highly popular in the USA for many years, but previous attempts to launch in the UK haven’t been so successful, despite launching first with recommendations from Sky, Sky were able to out their marketing muscle behind their SKY+ box when then entered the PVR market.

My First PVR was a Thompson built TIVO box, the thrill of pressing pause on Live TV soon wore off, but through the use of the Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons on the TIVO Remote control, the box soon learnt what type of program I liked, this was very important to me because at the time I had very little time to watch TV so it was very important that when I did sit down there was something on the Box that I wanted to watch. TIVO was a Godsend and I became quite attached to it. The ability to search the EPR and a true series link (which could span channels) was great as well.

Virgin are some way behind Sky with their V+ PVR boxes, but have a much greater VoD offering, so this teaming seems like a perfect match up.

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Gillian McKeith Leaves the Jungle to Internet Fame

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As previously discussed Current Events can have a real impact on the amount of Google Search carried out for a person or topic, as a case in point the recent story of the TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith.

Gillian McKeith was perhaps a minor celebrity, having a couple of TV shows and ongoing Magazine column, she was perhaps more infamous for the credibility of her qualifications rather then her media career, but this may change as Gillian has recently taken part in the UK Version of the TV shown I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

Her appearance on I’m a celebrity has been less then Triumphant, with several trials not going well for her, and as early as the first show the revelation that she had a severe phobia of insects, and heights, and close spaces, and rats, and it became quite clear that perhaps the Australian Jungle might not be the best place for her. In fact the viewers of the program started to wonder why on earth she had signed up for the show, as the environment and constant failure of tasks started to take it’s toll on her, she even apparently fainted on several occasions as the watching public continued to vote for her to do the tasks.

So was this the terrible experience all bad for Gillian McKeith, and are there any clues as to why she choose to enter the jungle.

Google Insights for Search may hold the answer, certainly her career wasn’t sparkling before going into the Jungle, and was probably in need of a boost, have a look at this Graph generated by Insights.

You can clearly see that since entering the Jungle, the Interest in Gillian has sky rocketed, this new found social relevance will no doubt lead to well paid TV interviews, Magazine Articles, Photo Shoots and possibly Book deals.

For Gillian this apparently disastrous appearance on a TV game show, may be the best thing to ever happen to her, just perhaps that was the plan all along.

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Mrs Stephen Fry – The True Star of Twitter in the Fry household

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When most people think of celebrity users of Twitter,  a lot of people will automatically think of Stephen Fry, he’s long championed the social network in the media and with nearly 2 million followers his Tweets have a greater  audience than some TV channels. Whether it’s finding questions for his live tours or giving updates on his latest filming projects Stephen has shown the potential of Twitter and provides one of the most entertaining celebrity time lines for his army of followers.

However, behind every good man there’s a good woman, and Twitter has provided the perfect medium for Edna, Stephen’s downtrodden wife & mother of his five, six or possibly seven kids to tell her story to the world.

The genuineness of  Edna’s Twitter time line aside, it’s a joy to read, relevant, exceptionally clever & witty. Everyday it provides genuine laugh out loud moments, frequently at the expense of her social media husband as she paints a detailed picture of her mundane world.

As more and more people find Edna’s Tweets the number of her  followers steadily increases, she currently has over 77,000 followers  and this has given her a genuine platform to launch her own book entitled Mrs. Fry’s Diary which is available now and is receiving many very positive reviews.

For entertainment value Edna’s time line is often a better read than Stephen’s, although Stephen’s Tweets give a genuine and amusing insight in celebrity life, Edna is fast becoming a celebrity in her own right.

Twitter is what you make of it, it can be dull as dishwater if you don’t pick who to follow carefully but if you follow interesting time lines then Twitter becomes something magical, and Edna certainly makes Twitter a better place.

Useful Links:

To view Stephen Fry’s Twitter time line click here

To View Mrs Stephen Fry’s Twitter time line click here

To see Mrs Fry’s Diary on Amazon click here

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Using iTunes to predict the results of the X-Factor

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I’ve been using this method of using the number of ratings that each each artists iTunes track receives, to predict who will be in the bottom two following the public vote on the Live  X-Factor Tunes. The results are shown in the table below.



This table would indicate that based on iTunes sales the bottom two will be Mary Byrne & Paije Richardson.

This is far from an exact science as not all demographics use iTunes, but it’s good for spotting trends.

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Projects Update

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In this post I talked about my on-going projects, I’ve decided to re-prioritise and re-structure the list to allow the best use of my time.

Here is the list of projects that will occupy my time in the near future.

iphone-experience.com

iphone-experience.com will be the successor to Netbook-experience.com which was one of my biggest successes but has reached the end of it’s natural life. Launched at a time when Netbooks were starting to become popular and came with Linux, I found a niche helping people get the most out of their Netbooks.

Technology has moved on and iphone-experience seems to be the natural replacement. Currently no work has been started on this project, other then securing the Domain Name, and some early testing of the BuddyPress Social networking site building system.

Techplay-Experience.com

Techplay-Experience.com is an example of recycling a domain from a site that was going to waste, originally a Tech News blog, the site has now become the online home for my photo’s and animations.

Niche Websites

I first read about creating Niche Websites on the excellent http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ website.

As the name suggests Niche Websites focus on specific and small scope of information websites. If you can find a niche that a few others cover you can have sucsess.

I have no experience of building Niche Websites so I’ll be starting from scratch, and I’ll document my progress on this site.

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Using iTunes to predict the results of the X-Factor Week 4

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Using this method of using the number of ratings that each each artists iTunes track receives, to predict who will be in the bottom two following the public vote on tonight’s X-Factor. The results are shown in the table below.

This table would indicate that based on iTunes sales the bottom two will be Treyc Cohen & Paije Richardson – we shall see.

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How to create a Blog – part 4 Managing Posts

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This is the 4th part in my ‘how to create a Blog’ series. Part 1 discussed how to buy some web space and choose a domain name. Part 2 discussed how to create a WordPress Blog in your web space.  Part 3 then discussed how to alter the appearance of your Blog using Themes.

Is this Article I’ll be looking at how to manage your blog posts.

When you created your WordPress blog a number of example entries were created automatically, we’ll take the opportunity to delete them to give you a completely blank blog to work with.

Firstly log into your WordPress Dashboard with your administrator credentials, and when your dashboard appears look down the sections along the left hand side and click on the word ‘Posts’ to open up the posts section.

This Section provides all the functionality you need to manage your posts. If you look at the main window you will see that it’s changed to the Posts Window, showing all the posts currently published on your blog.

You can see that at the moment there’s only the default post ‘Hello World!’ published. Underneath the post are 4 options, and you can use these options to either Edit, Quick Edit, Trash or View the post. Click on the word Trash and the post will be deleted.


This also deleted the default comment so you now have a completely blank Blog to work with

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How to create a Blog – part 3 Choosing a theme

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In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I discussed how to purchase a Domain name with Web Space and then how to create a Word Press Blog.

In Part 3 I’ll look at changing the Theme of your Blog to alter it’s appearance.

First log into your Dashboard by going to the following address http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin where yourdomain.com is replaced by the domain name you purchased. This will take you to the log in page for your blog, enter your admin details and click on Log in.

Your Dash Board will now load and will look similar to the Dashboard Shown below.

Along the left hand side of of the  Dashboard you will see the menu’s that are available to you, these provide the tools that you will use to configure your blog.

Click on the Appearance Button to expand the Appearance options, these provide you with the tools to alter the way that your Blog looks to your readers.

Themes provide your blog with colour schemes, font style, Widget options, & appearance settings and provide a very quick way to make your blog look stylish and attractive. Click on the Themes option and the Themes Pain will load in  the main screen of your Dashboard. Click on the Install Themes Tab.

This is where you can search for an appropriate theme for your site, for example perhaps you wanted a nature theme for you blog, you would enter the word nature into the search box and click on the Search button. All the nature themes will now be displayed on screen.

You can get a quick preview of each theme by clicking on the preview link. When you are happy with a theme click on the install option for that theme. You will be shown another preview of the theme and click on install now.

The Theme will now download and automatically install, to make the Theme active click on Activate.

The theme will now be active on your blog. Go to your Blog in your browser to see the end result.

You can install as many Themes as you want, and after you have installed a theme you can make it active whenever you like, so don’t be afraid to experiment

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Using iTunes to predict the results of the X-Factor Week 3

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Following on from this article last week, I’m again trying to predict who gets eliminated from tonight’s Live X-Factor using the number of ratings that each each artists track receives on iTunes.

The table below shows how many ratings each track gets, the average score of each track and a score based on the number of reviews multiplied by the average score of each track.

This table would indicate that the bottom three will be John Adeleye, Treyc Cohen & Mary Byrne.

In comparrison Google Insights highlighted 1 Direction, Rebecca Ferguson & Paije Richardson as being the most 3 unpopular.

Ladbrokes Bookmakers make Belle Amie, John Adeleye & Wagner the most popular to be the next act eliminated.

So no clear Favourites….although it’s not looking good for John Adeleye

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How to create a Blog – Part 2 How to create a WordPress Blog

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In this previous post I discussed how to purchase a Domain Name and Web Space using JustHost.com , but now it’s time to install WordPress in your Web Space so that you can start to put some content on line.

When you joined Just Host they will have sent you your Log in details for your Control Panel, so using your Username and Password log in.

After you have successfully logged in you will see your control panel which offers you a large number of tools and utilities. Scroll down until you see the Popular Choices section which will look something like the box below.

Click on WordPress and the WordPress management tool will load.  Click on the New Installation Link to start the WordPress creation Process

A new Web Page will now load and you will be presented with a number of preferences to complete. These are shown in the Window below:

In the top pull down box choose the domain name which you have purchased to host your Blog.

Leave the Install in directory box blank.

Choose an Admin username and enter it into the Administrator user name box, and choose a Password to go with it and enter it into the Password box. These are your Administrator details which you will use to access your WordPress Blog Dashboard.

Think of a nickname for the administrator – this is the name which appears when ever the admin writes  a blog post – and enter it into Admin Nickname Box, make a note of your Admin log on details and keep them safe.

Enter your contact E-Mail address into the Admin e-mail box.

Enter the name of your Blog in the Site Name box, and enter a brief description of your Blog into the description box.

When you are happy with all the above details click on the Install WordPress Button.

A summary window (Shown below) will now appear and click on the Finish installation button. Your Blog will now be created.

To check that the process has worked enter your Blogs domain name into your Web Browser and a demo blog with your Blogs Name should appear.


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How to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter

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There are many reasons why you may want to increase your number of followers on Twitter.

Perhaps you want to share information about a specific topic with as many like minded people as possible, maybe you have strong political views and are looking for a larger audience or perhaps you are a blogger looking to promote your site.

Whatever your reason there are several tools available which will do the job quickly and easily, but are relatively expensive, and whilst they are easy to use you don’t need them as Twitter itself has all the tools you need freely available.

How to increase your number of followers on Twitter:

1) After you have logged into Twitter you will see a search box on the top of the Window screen, enter your topic of interest (or niche) into the search box and click on the looking glass to start the search.


2) Twitter will now bring back a  list of recent Tweets about the subject. Find a tweet which definitely matches your niche and click on the image next to the start of the message. This will display that users home page on the right hand pane of the web browser window.

3) Click on the Follow button on the users home page.  You now follow this user.

4) On the right hand side of the screen Twitter displays the number of people that the user follows and the number of people that follow this tweeter.  Click on the word followers, this will display all the users that follow the tweeter, 20 users at a time, and some of which will share the same interest.

5) You can now go down the list of followers and click on the Follow button next to each Tweet ( it’s the left hand one from the 2 action buttons – shown below), you will now follow these users.

6) Every Time you follow a user then will get an email sent to them, notifying them that they have a new follower, and are given a link to follow you back. Not every user you follow will follow you back, but some will, especially if your tweets are high quality and of interest to them.

Using this method you can soon build up a number of like minded  followers, without having to pay for a utility.

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How to create a Blog – Part One Web Hosting and choosing Domain Names

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Your Blog is your space on the Web where you can write about what ever is on your mind, whether it’s your personal thoughts, a diary, a method of writing about your hobby or a medium to run your own news site, Blogs provide a quick and easy way for publishing information on the Internet.

The good news is that they are very easy to set up. This series of articles will help you get started and set up and publishing to your blog.

Before you can create a Blog you need to find space for it on the World Wide Web. You could setup your own server but it’s much easier if you use a Web hosting service to host your Blog for you.

I use JustHost.com and have found them to be great value for money providing unlimited web space and bandwidth for a low fee. When signing up to their service the first thing you will need to do is choose a domain name for your Blog.

Your Domain name is the address for your Blog, It’s how your readers find you, so it needs to be memorable, logical and appropriate for the content of your Blog, for example if your Blog is a personal blog about yourself then try and get a domain name that has your name in it, or if you are blogging about iPhones then try and get a domain name with the word iPhone in it. If your preferred domain name is already taken, be adventurous, and try variations or insert hyphens between words in your Domain name. For example I have chosen iphone-experience.com for my new iPhone blog.

When signing up with JustHost.com the first step is to identify the Domain name that you require, and they have systems which check to see if that domain name is available or not, if the Domain is already taken they will suggest appropriate alternatives, although you will probably want to try and find your own.

After you have found an appropriate available Domain Name you will need to enter your contact and payment details, following which your account will be created, you will have unlimited webspace and the domain registration process will automatically be started and then managed for you.

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