Words Dept.: category

There have been a couple of interesting developments on the local web publishing scene in recent days. Firstly, it looks as though Manchester Confidential’s paywall model has rather sheepishly fallen over after three months because boss Mark Garner finally realised some time after everyone else that it never had a hope of working. Commenting on [...]

The blog has now been fixed. It was offline for a couple of days after someone hacked it and redirected it to something Google didn’t like, which resulted in many seemingly intractable problems. Mercifully, someone pointed me in the direction of Manchester-based WordPress guru Simon Wheatley, who identified and fixed the problem in about ten [...]

Look kids! It’s DJ Davey C drinking a pint of bitter and looking like a dude! He’s going to be in town at the start of October and his peeps are hosting a wicked all night rave at the Pure night club! According to the e-flyer (helpfully distributed this week by Manchester Confidential to all [...]

Look at this picture I captured from the news earlier. I’m surprised the BBC allowed Michael O’Leary, boss of “low-cost” airline Ryanair, on air in this get-up. The point is to publicise some new routes from Leeds to fifty miles outside a number of European cities. In the most shameless and embarrassing way possible. I [...]

The Guardian reckons that people aren’t blogging so much any more, and much prefer the shorter, sweeter option of tweeting and updating their status on Facebook. A lot of it is based on anecdotal evidence but there’s some science behind it, according to Charles Arthur. NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When [...]

You might have noticed I haven’t written much here recently. That’s because I can’t think of anything interesting to write about. Each post takes quite a lot of time to write and research and, after two years of doing that, in the long run I’m not sure what the point is. Google ranking? Lots of [...]

A selection of my latest bookmarks. You could visit my Tumblelog for more stuff I’ve seen on the web. The Marple Leaf: Silver linings on dark clouds “There is light at the end of this dark tunnel. These people [the BNP] are nutters. They will now have to face the same level of scrutiny as [...]

I’ve adopted a new theme for the site, which I think looks a bit more modern and clean than the old one. If experience is anything to go by, you probably won’t like it. It should work OK in Firefox and Safari, as well as the much hated Internet Explorer. If you notice any glitches, [...]

Why is it that it takes a Daily Express journalist to go on the attack against survivors of Dunblane for everyone to suddenly realise what a complete piece-of-shit newspaper it is? And why is a bandwagon of outrage only gathering pace some ten days after the story was published? Since the start of this week my [...]

I’m going on holiday for the next three weeks and will not be posting anything on Words Dept. until after Christmas and possibly until the New Year. I may, if I can be bothered, post some Twitter updates while in Brazil, which will appear in the little panel on the left. Until then I wish [...]