The Iain Lee Column: The Magic of the Internet
I have been struggling to recall what life was like before the internet, and I honestly can’t remember much of it at all. It’s just a hazy blur of moping around, standing at bus stops and reading things that I believe we used to call books. Sounds hideous, doesn’t it? The www has enriched our sad, pathetic lives by allowing us to access ANYTHING we want. The world is out there and we can peak at it anytime. Want to take a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel, then tap in this catchy little URL http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/x-Pano/CSN/Visit_CSN_Main.html and you can. If you’re curious as to what every Beatles song played at the same time sounds like, then go here (I warn you now, it sounds blooming awful) and if you have ever wondered the height of every American president, then you need to visit the Presidential Height Index which is here – Abe Lincoln is the tallest at a staggering 6ft10! With all of this knowledge and art available to us at just a few taps of a keyboard, why then do we spend 98% of our time looking primarily at pornography and pictures of cats (statistics from The Office Of Made Up Statistics)? These two things dominate our online experience. Luckily, no one has yet managed to successfully combine these two experiences. …Oh hang on, I just Googled it. They have. You can find that for yourself, you mucky little things. There is no chance of me fouling up my history folder on my browser with filth like that. Again. By the way, if you own more than one cat you are mental. If you film your harem of cats and put those films on YouTube, you are completely certifiable. If those videos then get nearly 30,000,000 views, you’re still mental but also a genius, a bit like Ronald McDonald. Japanese cat-o-phile Shirone Koshiro is all of these things. Why are these films so popular? I have literally no idea. Have a look and see what you think. Speaking of mental, after a plea for websites that I could write about in this column, I received loads of suggestions (send them to iainATiainlee.com – you know replacing AT with @ so the spammers don’t get me please). But as soon as I saw the subject heading ‘Women Laughing Alone With Salad’, I knew this month’s search was over. Whoever came up with this site is either a lunatic on a par with The Joker from the hugely popular Batman series of comic books, or a genius on a par with Brainiac from the virtually unknown Superman series of comic books. It is literally pictures of women. Who are laughing. On their own. Whilst being near salad. Even thinking about it is making me chuckle. Seriously have a look now, because this will be your new favourite website of all time ever for today. It’s websites like this that make me think some people have way too much time on their hands. Why would you do this? Why? Finally, I feel bad for pointing you in the direction of that unlistenable Beatles ‘thing’ at the start of this piece. Let me try and rectify that by playing you the most amazing mash up of songs by the 60’s mop-top-pop-quartet. Every note comes from Liverpool’s finest and Hank Handy really has done a fantastic job. Magical. You can read Iain Lee’s very own take on the internet here on the 123-reg blog every last Friday of the month. A familiar face on television since he got his first break landing the job hosting Channel 4’s thrice weekly topical comedy show the 11 O’Clock Show at the age of 25, Iain is also an award winning radio presenter, top podcast creator and a genuinely funny guy with an eye for the bizarre.
The Iain Lee Column: The Magic of the Internet
The internet is an amazing place. It can unite, inspire, move and arouse. There are an infinite number of sites to look at and an amazing amount of information out there, waiting to be accessed. Why then do I only ever really look at 4 sites – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and eBay? I have to confess, I am a massive eBay addict, despite the fact it’s written with a lower case e and then a capital b. That makes no grammatical sense whatsoever and is actually quite annoying. Still, where else am I going to spend money I don’t have on tat I don’t need? I have made it my personal mission to delve deeper into the www and find gems that are hidden away, waiting for someone to stumble across them, dust them off, and hold them up to the bright sunlight of scrutiny. OK, I got a bit lost in that metaphor (or simile, I’m not fussy) but hopefully you get the idea. I find good stuff. I show to you. You like. Recently I have been marvelling at 19th century technology via 21st century machinery. The photograph has taken many shapes and forms over the years, but it’s always going to be a part of our lives and with the sale of Instagram for $190 billion , photos have never been cooler. The best sites are the ones that keep on giving. Well, actually, the best sites are the ones with free knockers, but let’s try and keep this clean. www.dearphotograph.com is deceptively simple. At first glance, it’s people taking photographs of them holding up photographs. Wow. AMAZING! But look closer, it’s so much more than that. It’s pictures of ghosts. Author Taylor Jones has collected hundreds of photos of people standing in the site where old photos were taken, whilst holding those old photos up in the same position they were taken. There, got it? No, because it is bloody hard to describe. OK. Imagine you have a photo from the 70’s of your mum stood on some church steps. You then go back to those same church steps, armed with that photo and a camera. You hold the photo up so it looks like mum is still on those steps, and snap, you take a photo of that! There, that should help get an image in your head. I was thinking of explaining this with a comparison to the ‘Crush Your Head’ guy, but how on earth a reference to a long forgotten character in cult Canadian sketch show Kids in the Hall with help is anyone’s guess. But it’s sort of similar. Have a look http://youtu.be/1pKXMcfx1d8 While I may not have sold this site too well, it’s definitely worth checking out. It starts off cute, but as I kept looking and reading the stories that go with them, I started to get very emotional. I’ll be honest, the picture of an old man holding a baby with the caption ‘This is how my granddad used to hold me…now I am holding him’ had me in tears. But shh, don’t tell anyone or I will have to kill you. And then take a photo of it. If you want proper spooky pics, then have a look at this www.scienceofghosts.com – this is genuinely amazing. Do ghosts exist? Of course not, don’t be silly, but this corner of cyberspace almost convinces me they do. Some of the pictures need a bit of concentration, but when you finally ‘see’ that head of a dead man hovering behind a 2 year old in a garden (I realise I needn’t have put the word dead, as ghosts do tend to be rather deceased by definition) a tiny little bit off wee will leave your body. Or what about the wedding photo? Nothing there, but hang on, I can see something behind that dudes trousers, and if you look up a bit…IT’S A TINY DEAD MAN POKING OUT FROM BEHIND! Again, it almost definitely isn’t because I am not a 12 year old girl and so I KNOW FOR A FACT that ghosts DO NOT EXIST. It’s a shame, because I’d love to meet one, but it just ain’t gonna happen. Some paranormal photos that aren’t quite so impressive can be found on www.ghostphotos.org This site claims to contain pictures of ghosts. I can tell you now, they aren’t. They are just very, very bad photos. Circling a blob and saying it’s a man’s face, does not make it a man’s face. It makes it a blob. Seriously, I have never seen such bad ghostly images in my life. One is titled ‘Ed eating a peanut butter and jelly’ and that’s all it is. A man wearing braces, eating a sandwich in a really blurry photo. THAT IS NOT SUPERNATURAL OR SPOOKY ON ANY LEVEL! It is, however, very funny that someone could think these pictures were worth sharing with the entire world. Worth having a look just for a giggle. If you’ve got any sites you think I should be looking at, please let me know iainATiainlee.com (you know replacing AT with @ so the spammers don’t get me!) You can read Iain Lee’s very own take on the internet here on the 123-reg blog every last Friday of the month. A familiar face on television since he got his first break landing the job hosting Channel 4’s thrice weekly topical comedy show the 11 O’Clock Show at the age of 25, Iain is also an award winning radio presenter, top podcast creator and a genuinely funny guy with an eye for the bizarre.
8 WordPress Plugins you have to Install
WordPress is one of the most well known blogging platforms. In recent years it has evolved so much that people like myself use it as the CMS of choice for all their websites. As well as this you can install a wide range of plugins, acting like extensions/add-ons to the WordPress platform, that can really help your site or blog in many ways. Here are 8 plugins I make sure I have on all WordPress sites: 1. WordPress SEO by Yoast Joost de Valk is a genius when it comes to WordPress, and this plugin illustrates that. The WordPress SEO plugin helps you with many aspects of optimising your site including editing META data (page titles and descriptions), inserting breadcrumbs, enabling an XML sitemap to help search engines find all the pages you want indexed for people to find, and lets you add information within your RSS feed so that other sites don’t just steal your content and put it on their own site. 2. Google Analytics Another plugin by Joost de Valk, which helps you connect your WordPress site to a Google Analytics account. If you are interested in analytical data this is a great plugin as it lets you segment data directly from the plugin settings page so you don’t have to learn code yourself! 3. W3 Total Cache Google doesn’t like websites that take a long time to load. In fact, they actually use page load time as a factor on where to rank your site in their search results. This plugin helps this by using a number of methods to reduce page load time. 4. WP Smush.it smush.it is a service owned by Yahoo! that lets you compress your images to the lowest filesize without reducing any quality whatsoever. Simple really! If you already have a bunch of images on your site that’s fine – there is an option to “bulk smush.it” which will go through each image already uploaded and compress them for you. 5. Facebook Comments I developed this one 🙂 This plugin inserts the Facebook Comments system into your site and places it above the native WordPress comments form. Once installed and configured you can then manage all comments within your Facebook account. I use this for a few reasons: There is less spam activity as you need to be logged into your Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL or Hotmail account. The comments are now indexed by Google, which means they are more SEO friendly than they were a month ago When someone comments on a post or page, the comment can be posted to their Facebook profile. This adds a social aspect to your site as the comment will appear on their friends’ news feed with links back to your site 6. Twitter Feed Another one I developed. This feed is a more SEO friendly way to output your latest tweets, search results, hashtags, mentions and favourites into your site. Using a simple shortcode is all you need to do to insert the feed and is highly configurable. 7. Gravity Forms This last one isn’t free but I use it all the time and is, in my opinion, well worth the money. This plugin takes contact forms to a whole new level! This highly versatile plugin helps you insert forms of any kind into your site from a simple contact form and questionnaire to a fully fledged entry form to create new posts within your own site. Everything can be configured from what is asked, whether new questions should be asked based on what has been entered already, and your thank you message once the form has been completed. 8. Simple URLs This plugin lets you manage outbound links and track them by clicks. So, for example, your blog site is at myblogname.com. Your link to somewhere you want to track outside of the site is abc.com. Instead of directly linking to abc.com you can make a Simple URL like myblogname.com/go/abc. This is good for a number of reasons. The main reason I use, is to use them for affiliate links. This way they are easier to give out to people, they’ll be tracked and you can keep them within your own domain and change where they link to at any time. This article was written by Alex Moss, partner at Manchester SEO agency FireCask. He provides freelance SEO for all kinds of businesses as well as developing WordPress Plugins. You can find him on Linkedin or follow him on Twitter. Follow @alexmoss