46. The Other Awards.

The first time I was nominated for an award on WordPress, I had only just started blogging, and had never heard of such a thing. I thought I’d won a Pulitzer Prize! So I checked it out. It was a chain letter. I give an award to seven people, who give it to seven people, and so on until everyone has got one. It’s just silly. I turned it down, as tactfully as I could, and went on about my business.

I’m afraid I can’t accept this. I’m allergic to gold, and besides, it would clash with the curtains in my bathroom.

PayPal on WordPress. The road to riches?

There are three different ways of approaching a project. My way, my wife’s way, and everybody else’s way. Let’s take painting a cupboard as an example. Here’s what everyone else seems to do;

1. Measure the cupboard.

2. Go to the shop.
2.a Buy enough sandpaper or paint stripper to strip off the old paint.
2.b. Buy enough masking tape to cover the hinges and locks.
2.c. Buy some primer.
2.d Buy some paint.
2.e. Buy some paintbrushes.
2.f. Buy some solvent to wash the paintbrushes with.

3. Lay out some old newspaper on the ground outside.

4. Take out the cupboard.

5. Strip off the old paint.

6. Cover the hinges and locks with masking tape.

7. Paint with primer. Give it a day to dry. Wash off the brushes with solvent.

8. Paint a first coat. Give it a day to dry. Wash off the brushes with solvent.

9. Paint a second coat. Give it a day to dry. Wash off the brushes with solvent.

10.Take the cupboard back inside.

Boring.

This technique will give you a sparkly, new looking cupboard. It will also leave you feeling hollow. Empty. Unfulfilled. Your cupboard will look just like everyone else’s. How sad your life is. Next time do it my way;

Crashing back down to Earth.

Today started out very well indeed. I had posted on my blog just before going to bed, and checked my stats first thing in the morning. I thought WordPress was broken, because I had over a hundred views. It turns out that I had been Freshly Pressed by the happiness engineers.

For those of you I have just lost, the happiness engineers are the shadowy, sinister organisation that controls the blogging world. Think of them as a slightly more cheerful version of the thought police from George Orwell’s 1984. If your blog is not quite positive enough, they might just pay you a little visit.Freshly Pressed is a page where they put up the very best blog posts in each category. The categories today included neuroscience, books, fatherhood and civil liberties. Mine was the very best in the shoplifting category. The other three shoplifting posts were just not up to scratch.

How to drive traffic to your blog.

I started this blog because my wife made me jealous. I was spending my evenings watching lumberjacks on the history channel (I know, I don’t get it either!) while she connected with the world. I was really enjoying it, too, until my mother asked me how I was going to make any money from it. I wasn’t. I was doing it for the affirmation one can only get from having complete strangers like what one was doing. Or rather “like” what one was doing.