that canadian girl

This evening, I came across a post where I couldn’t help but think that I had to share with fellow bloggers.

Darren Rowse, pro-blogger and six-digit-salary man, tells bloggers to get rid of their inferiority complex, and I could not agree more! He gets loads of emails from bloggers asking for tips or advice (why don’t I get more mail from you readers?!) with many self-deprecating comments, claiming they’re “no A-list blogger” and “don’t write as well as they do…”

So this is to tell you, my fellow bloggers, to take pride in what you do. It doesn’t matter if all you write is a weenie little blog to track your child growing up, your BMI going down by preparing for a half-marathon for charity, or a technology rant.

Think positive, be proud of the fact that you’ve braved the wild world of blogging. You may not realise it but you’re boldly going where most of people around you won’t have. So grab that blog by the horns and be a sassy self-promoter. Whether it gets you a job, helps you find like-minded people for a project or just gives you an outlet to blow some steam off, enjoy the fact that you’re still more cutting edge than you might think.

Anyone who’s witnessed a typical weekday for me will have noticed my slight addiction to Twitter, a service that simply can’t be explained and has to be experienced.

But in my attempt to justify the thousands of updates I’ve posted on it, I’ll highlight a few amazing ways Twitter has helped me and those around me this week.

• It helped me discover how other bloggers felt about being accosted by PR agency, resulting in an article for The Blog Medic called “Marketing Ethics: Ten ways to piss off a blogger”.
• An ad hoc conversation led to a friend getting a job offer, and the entire conversation up to scheduling an interview call happened over Twitter.
• It allowed me to find a couple of new contracts for Pepsmedia redesigning blog templates & site launches.
• Since SXSW, I’ve managed to stay in touch with many of the lovely people I met there without going through the usual “ok I’ll reply to that email later”, where later becomes never. By keeping it bite-sized, Twitter makes it easy to stay in touch.
• I’ve found amazing support for the idea of SocialMediaCamp in London in July through fellow Twitter users who are interested and can provide skills and contacts I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.
• A few people offered sound advice with regards to the process to setting up a limited company, again calling on the experience of others.
• It was the fastest channel through which I heard about Russell’s decision to stop developing Mowser on Monday night.
• It’s a great way to swap kitty photos with Mel Kirk

So there you go, it’s a business resource like no other, a great communication tool and an entertaining place to have water cooler conversations with like-minded people.

I’m really miffed with Ford in Cambridge. This week, I took my fab little red Ford Ka, which is about to turn one year old (7,000 miles on the clock, running like a dream) for its first yearly service.

I bought it last year, got a great deal (literally, 25% off the original showroom price) on a brand new 5-miles-on-the-clock Ka, just weeks before I passed my driving test. We’ve taken great care of it, Andrew’s been the only person cleaning it - both because I’m a lazy cow and because he puts such love and care into it. He uses these fancy shmancy cleaning products acquired through a friend who’s a professional detailer (really high class valeting) and it always looks amazingly shiny.

As a rule of thumb, when he gets his car serviced at BMW, he always asks them not to wash it. I didn’t do the same when I went to Ford, which was a stupid move, because they cleaned it. The paint finish now looks like a bunch of children cleaned it with dish soap and gritty sponges. In the space of 3 hours, my car went from looking brand new to looking pretty averagely scratched.

Trying to discuss with the car valeting service manager, Brian, at Ford was pretty pointless. He wasn’t having any of it, “my boys didn’t do this. We clean 200 cars a day and they don’t do it that way.” Well… if you clean 200 cars a day, you probably don’t give each one much attention or carefully rinse your washing mitts in between, do you? He offered to polish it “as a good will gesture”, but still didn’t admit he was in the wrong.

Andrew’s taking on the job of polishing as much of it out as possible, and I’m in two minds about getting his detailing friend to come and machine polish it properly. But one thing that’s for sure is that I’ll get Ford Marshall in Cambridge to annotate my file to say never to wash it when it goes in for a service, thank you very much, we’ll do it ourselves.

I know a lot of people will roll their eyes at this and say “well, your car still runs, doesn’t it? What’s the big fuss?” but I care. I like my belongings to still look good over the years, especially when it doesn’t require huge amounts of extra time and it means it lasts that much longer without needing to be replaced. My iPod is scratched to high heavens after living in my handbag, and that’s fine, it’s so disposable. But my iPhone has a nice red case to avoid it getting damaged. And my car doesn’t go through Tesco carwash.

So if you’re in the Cambridge area and get your car serviced at Ford, think twice before letting them give it a clean while you’re there. And if you’re that Nissan 350Z owner who also complained about scratched paintwork a few weeks ago, I’m sorry, we still haven’t got through to them.

Now, I hope this post gets right up there in search engines when someone looks for Ford Marshall. Not because the rest of the service is poor, it’s great in fact! But it’ll be a word of warning for those who like their paintwork scratch-free!

A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.

The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.

To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.

What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.

Anyone got a better idea?

Whatever, Google. Big Table isn’t all that, I had that idea a year ago, launched it, got the tshirt and moved on.

Want proof? Here’s me and my Big Table hanging out together last summer.

A short word of advice to fellow WordPress users. Not only is WordPress 2.5 so awesomely great that you should upgrade immediately, even if it was just for the beautifully refreshed admin area (after years of staring at the same old UI, it’s so good to see a new one!) but you should upgrade if you want to keep appearing in Technorati.

Good ol’ Technorati, one of the largest blog directories on the web, has announced that, due to some security issues with older versions of WordPress, you need to upgrade to the latest version in order to continue being indexed.

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

This will be interesting to watch, seeing as even large blogs like TechCrunch haven’t gotten around to updating yet. Many less techy users will have to wait until their hosting’s control panel updates the Fantastico scripts to contain the latest version of WordPress. Considering the millions of ghost town blogs currently listed on Technorati, I wonder whether this will become a huge Spring Cleaning of all the unloved, dead blogs across the web. This might just turn out to be a good thing…

So, go on, get off your butt and upgrade WordPress to the latest version, and tell those around you to do the same!

I find it hard to believe that this blog is now four whole years of age. It certainly wasn’t my first blog - the first would probably trace back to around 2000, but was a poor excuse for a blog. It was, however, the first WordPress blog where I actually bothered buying a real domain name rather than a borrowed subdomain on someone else’s dodgy hosting, and it’s the first time I made an effort to scrap some thoughts together on a somewhat regular basis.

The first post was something to do with There.com, an early sibling of Second Life, the kind of avatar-based online world I’ve never had much interest in. A random start, but a start nonetheless.

Now, four years on, I can hardly imagine my life without blogging. It’s shaped much of what my career has become, giving me the fun experience of writing for Shiny Shiny a few times and resulting in getting headhunted to become a corporate blogger for Taptu a year ago.

Since those days, blogging has become pretty mainstream, both to my pleasure and dismay. It’s great to see so many people picking up a hobby once reserved for nerds who knew how to clunk together some HTML and update pages manually. Unfortunately, so many people also get the wrong end of the stick. I can’t judge personal bloggers, because it’s entirely up to them to write how they like and when they like. It’s the marketers, the CEOs, the business people who’ve decided to pick up blogging - I wish I could lend them a hand, help them make sense of blogs, which are so much more than just an online marketing platform.

But at least, at the very least, they are picking up on these new technologies. You gotta start somewhere, after all. You fall over the first few times you ride your bike, but you learn. Hopefully, I can help these marketers stop falling off their bikes. (Oh now that was a funny mental picture for me. Was it good for you?)

So, four years then… I might not be willing to raise little sprogs of my own any time soon, but my blog, that’s my baby. Happy birthday, little one!

Looking back:

• First birthday post
• Second birthday post: Whoops, I’d forgotten!
• Third birthday - I’m in trouble!: Andrew takes my blog down for a few hours after I ate all the Skinny Cow ice cream…

A bit of Friday afternoon giggles here, Andrew just sent me what feels like possibly the most accurate lolcat I’ve ever seen.

Gary Vaynerchuk, for those who don’t yet know him, is the guy behind, in front and all around Wine Library TV. He’s a raving looney, a totally loveable geek but most of all, a rough diamond of community relations amongst the world of overly polished marketing bullshit. He says things as they are and has marked me enough during SXSWi this year that I’ve got a couple of things he’s said up on my board of inspirational quotes in the office. (Thank you Gary, genuinely!)

He also agreed with me that making your own wine is a bad idea, mmmkay dad?

PS - I want my own WLTV sweatband bracelet thinger!

Since my last post on the 20th, we’ve been having a whirlwind of a time! We went away for a week to a fabulous castle in Devon, which we lovingly named Castle Anthrax (if that isn’t self explanatory enough and you’re wondering why we’re wearing very silly costumes in some of these pics, then watch this clip or rent Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail.

I couldn’t tell you because Andrew worried that you’d come and nick our telly while we’re away. But now that we’re home and equipped with two barking mad security cats, now, I can tell you. And let me tell you, it was a blast of a holiday. No technology, just a bloody big fireplace and a jacuzzi on the roof of the castle.

You’ll tell me, it’s no excuse, you’ve been back since Friday, why haven’t you blogged since, you slacker? Well, partially because I’m just that, a slacker who wallows in her non-blogging guilt. But also because my brain power has been taken by some new and exciting project I’ve cooked up. More on this next week.

Tonight’s blog entry, aside from a (totally insincere, can you tell?) apology for not writing in nearly two weeks, it’s my first opportunity to play with the freshly-released WordPress 2.5, which has a lovely and swish new user interface. Thank you Mr. Mullenweg, we lurve you!

This is all we’ve got time for today, folks, but I’ll be back later with some more of my insightful babble. For now, back to your knitting, origami swan making or whatever it is you people do with your evenings!

Good night.
Mrs. Vero S. Pepperrell
Queen Bee in your Bonnet