Freddy Flintoff clones mourn the passing of Retro Yakking

It is with great sadness that I announce the closure of Retro Yakking, a project that has brought so much pleasure to so few with its acerbic wit and jokes pinched from QI. Little did I know when I began typing randomly at my keyboard in late 2008 that the place would still be attracting loads of visitors per day, even in its current vegetative state.

“But Yak,” I hear you cry, “Retro Yakking is still there, viewable for all to see on the interwebs!” Well, this much is true. But since my access rights to the blog have been revoked, and blogdog are currently not renewing old accounts, it’s highly unlikely any more content will appear there.

Yes, Retro Yakking shall remain merely as an archive of past glories, but there is no future for the site at blogdog.com. Since I have much less free time to dedicate to humour writing these days, it’s doubtful the site would have seen much activity anyway, even if blogdog rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of numerous dead bloggers left in the wake of today.com.

It was fun while it lasted, but this chapter in the tale of Harry Yack has now ended. Very slowly and quietly. David Gerard, you had it right all along, my friend.

A Nutri Grain for you if you cared enough to even read this.

Cameron gives Brown the two finger salute

I walked into work the other morning only to find a load of blokes in suits who sat us down and explained how we would have to work for twice the number of hours for half the pay with a grand total of one week in holidays. Per decade.

They told us it’s the same everywhere else and nobody would even think about re-employing our sorry posteriors this side of Cheetham Hill. Which sucks just a bit.

The good news is that, for the next couple of months at least, we get free drinks in the canteen and can address customers with as many expletives as we like . Plus, we get to wear slippers and dressing gowns to make us look like Hugh Hefner without consequence or recrimination. Up to a point anyway.

Don’t you just love the Conservative-Liberal coalition?

A pointless little politics-related thought/mildly amusing quip there. Anyway, I’m here to tell you that for the time being I’m gonna publish all my Retro Yakking stuff here at Illarterate instead, mainly because I plan to wind that project down for good. Don’t worry, though, because I won’t just disappear from the face of the earth like last time. Or maybe I will, who knows?

I really should get that blogroll up and running again, plus there’s a whole bunch of housekeeping with regards to archiving old projects. I shall get round to that when I have the time and resources, but for now, console yourself in the fact I’m not rotting six feet under unlike certain street sweepers. Ciao for now.

I am aware there are numerous people

Some time ago, the company laid off a rather large section of its most popular and active writers, leading to numerous speculations over their ultimate motives. Well, I am here, at the risk of being lambasted or even losing my Today.com account, to put the record straight and say to these people — in the nicest possible way — what the heck did you expect?

Now, I am quite fortunate (?!) to have been screwed over in the past by certain web hosts by virtue of neglecting to read the small print, blundering blindly forward without a care in the world, and am not one of the said bloggers laid off by Today. At least not yet. I’d like to think, however, that my (bad) experiences have given me a little bit of insight about how the business works – you scratch my back, I scratch yours; you get nothing for nothing and any other such cliche you could care to mention.

When you sign up to Today.com, you enter into an agreement that basically means you represent Today.com by the very fact your blog is hosted under their name on their server. If you violate the Terms of Service, you can expect to be notified and perhaps even warned, just like in the real life workplace.

In the same way, don’t expect to be rewarded if you’re doing nothing to earn it. Today.com is a business and has to first of all stay afloat in order to continue providing the service it offers, all the while catering for the interests of its bloggers (or ‘workers’, if you like).

Now, I will concede the aesthetic side of the business — variety of blog skins etc. — has been largely and unfortunately neglected. We all know we’re going through a tough economic period and smaller, more independent businesses are having to accommodate for this so as not to go out of business. Today.com is no exception.

Whilst I am not obligated to do so, I feel I have to stand by the company whilst I still can and do my part in helping the company as long as I can. Today, in my opinion, is a noble and honest organisation that deserves at least some credit for its efforts. Who knows, maybe tomorrow things will change and I will be forced to move to another host, re-establish Retro Yakking right here at Illarterate or perhaps set up a whole new website.

But I would not have any ill feelings towards Today should this happen. I would not feel ripped off or screwed over because of the experience I have gained from many months of blogging with a competent and honest company. Even if it turns out they have taken me for a ride, I wouldn’t really care that much because it’s been so much fun. And I think that’s the most important thing.

• Give Today.com a go
• Visit my Today blog

I’ve witnessed the downfall of Wikia due to its increased reliance on advertising first hand in the past year. Whilst I don’t want to dwell on the events of precisely one year ago, I decided to breifly revisit the subject with a general account of what happened from my point of view. It can be found here, and is the first piece I’ve published at HubPages.com, an online content hub (as it were) for writers and businesspeople to post articles.

It’s been somewhat painful, though I hope to have exorcised one or two demons. Hmm, I know that’s unlikely, but it was nice to vent my spleen again.

Go there now.

It just goes to show that in the age of the Internet, it’s nigh on impossible to completely stifle journalism. Life goes on regardless, and even news sources as well-respected as the BBC are turning to the man on the street — or should that be, the man in front of his computer or speaking on his mobile phone — for their informational fix.

People tuning in to tonight’s BBC News could see pixellated, mobile phone-shot footage taken straight from YouTube in the place of regular crystal clear, polished reportage. It may have been lo-tech, but was it necessarily any worse off for it?

You may say that this new age source of news has the capability to be infinitely more biased than your typical centre-right news channel, and this is undeniably true. But is it any different from Jeremy Clarkson’s newspaper column, or a typical review on last night’s television? Well, only in the medium by which it is transmitted.

The truth is that, from time to time, we want bias. We want gritty, real-life stories from people that have experienced this stuff first hand – content undiluted by the need for neutrality and sanitisation.

Like it or not, the blogger is becoming as much a part of journalism as the newspaper editor, the television researcher and that bloke with the deep voice that reads the news on Five Live.

Spot the deliberate error

The BBC recently launched a new programme which attempts to seek out Britain’s best young orator. Among the issues raised by the series is that of technology (read: the Internet and texting) and its effect on the English language. Whilst some champion tradition and mourn the death of grammar in the country’s youth, I say we should stop being so wary of change.

After all, I’m sure Shakespeare received much criticism for his habit of making words up, and look where we are now — hundreds of words coined by the Great Bard are in widespread use in modern English.

I’m not saying that poor grammar and spelling should be encouraged. How many times have you tried to read a page of text but utterly failed to comprehend the meaning behind it due to the God-awful sea of indecipherable text language? In my view, once too often.

You will always get these — it’s an inevitibility that a medium as open as the Internet would be filled with incomprehensible blog posts and utterly unfathomable essays. We should instead look at the good parts associated with such a medium, namely kids getting into writing as a medium whereas before they would just sit in front of Chucklevision or something.

The point I am trying to make is thus: find your own style and stick to it. Proofread your work, but don’t send yourself absolutely batty with endless revisions of the same old posts. If grammar is not your strong point, don’t sweat it: as long as you are understood and can get your point across, that’s all that matters. Perfect Oxford English is, for most of us, an unachievable fantasy.

EntreCard got me 250 visitors in the first three days I used it. So how did I manage it? Here are some tips for effective use of EntreCard.

• Create a banner as the standard text links are largely unappealing. Take the time to construct your own custom banner ad (125 x 125px) to be striking and effectively depict your blog’s theme. Remember, this will represent your blog within the whole EntreCard network.
• Place your own EntreCard quite high up on your page. People surfing quickly will be able to swiftly drop their card and it makes your blog more appealing to potential advertisers.
• Download the Entrecard Toolbar for Firefox. With a fast computer, you can scroll through 300 blogs in around 1 and a half hours. The favourites feature also makes creating a droplist much easier.

Method

• Begin with blogs in your inbox, then move onto your droplist (favourites). These represent your core followers.
• Next, go through the newest blogs (All categories) as they are likely to have new, active droppers
• Then, scroll through the most popular blogs in your category, and finally the most popular in similar categories/all categories.

Purchasing ads

• As you build up credits, you will be able to advertise on the more popular blogs. Place an emphasis on blogs in your own category and advertise on both cheap and expensive blogs 50%-50%
• Alternatively, you can save up your credits to exchange them for real cash. See here for more details.
  

A theme by StyleShout and Dan Farrimond

Styleshout have some excellent Blogger themes at their website. One in particular that caught my eye was one named Underground. However I wasn’t too sure about the colour scheme – its grey and red industrial theme seemed a bit generic for my liking. So, I spent an afternoon modifying it to a white-on-black theme to use on one of my blogs.

• Download the Underground Black theme for Blogger (Right click > Save As)
  

How to install:

1. Download the theme from the link above.
2. Open up your blog’s control panel in Blogger.
3. Go to ‘layout’ and choose the ‘HTML’ tab.
4. Where prompted, select the file to upload from your hard drive. (You may need to delete some widgets in order for this to work.)
5. Modify as appropriate using the HTML editor. Create your own 600 x 60px banner and upload it using the layout editor.

And that’s it! Enjoy.

• Revisit old blog posts and see if you can word them better. Update them by removing dead links, fixing spelling errors and things that have changed since you first wrote the post.
• Spend a bit of time choosing a theme you like and stick with it until such time that necessity says you change. For example, you may decide to add Google Ads and extra widgets, meaning your existing theme is not really any longer adequate to house them all effectively.
• If you feel so inclined, constantly revise and customise your template (XML, HTML, CSS) to your own tastes. Personally, I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to this – I’m not happy until my blog looks right. Just remember, though, that the posts are the most important thing and the theme should be chosen around this.
• Once in a while, really go to town on something. Some might say you should do this in every post you make, but in reality it’s extremely difficult. Once a month, really research something and attempt to cram as much interesting information in there as possible. Use these as your reference posts, the pinnacle of your blogging talents. Mention them to friends and online buddies who’ll see your post and say “wow, that’s really good,” hopefully dropping one or two comments and bookmarking your site before they leave.
• Garnering attention is important, but you want to be careful not to overdo things. Promote your blog in moderation and limit your posts to one per forum – usually that will do, but the odd bump is not out of the question.