Isn’t it embarassing when someone publically states on a website that how something cool is about to happen to that site, and then something crushingly mundane happens?

My plans for the all-new tossr (and I hope nobody’s actually excited about the all-new tossr; it’s going to be the same design and pretty much the same old shit but with a more concentrated marketing drive) have been postponed for at least one more day (which realistically means nothing until Sunday night now) due to the fact that I’ve spent my evening watching the latest episodes of Lost, South Park and The Simpsons, being sidetracked by websites about Lego, eating cherry bakewells, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, my unread posts in Bloglines have been accumulating to the point where I have 540 posts spread over 84 feeds — which isn’t the furthest behind anyone has ever been with their blog-reading but the sheer lack of motivation I have for the task certainly makes it seem that way.
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Drowning in the blogmire

Time to knock things up a notch I think; I’m going to try and write more interesting posts in future (and hopefully fewer of the last-minute ones I do just for the sake of fulfilling my daily posting obligation, which you can recognise by the fact that they generally consist of a link and an anecdote), and hopefully get more people reading. This also requires a bit more marketing, and I hereby unveil the first step towards getting the tossr name out there a bit more: I’ve installed Peter Harkins’ Sociable plugin, which provides handy links which bookmark the post in question at a variety of social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, Digg, etc.

However, there’s been a bit of talk recently about Sociable and its “noisy” visual appearance, so I decided to take a little look when I installed it to see what could be done to “turn the volume” down a little and avoid “deafening” my readers (see how I extended that metaphor to breaking point? There’s going to be more of that in the all-new tossr, so stay tuned!)

What I decided to do is to move the icons into the pop-up tooltip that usually tells you what social bookmarks are for. I changed the trigger text (known in the plugin as the “tagline”) from “Share and Enjoy” to “Hover over me for social bookmark links” to point the reader in the right direction and slimmed down the gargantuan list of 25 icons to a more manageable 5.

At present, it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer for some reason (I think it could be the fact that I changed the SPAN tags used in the plugin to DIVs as it isn’t syntactically correct to have a list within a SPAN) but I’m looking into using tooltip.js or something to make it fancier anyway, which should hopefully get it working in IE again.

Perhaps it’s a sign that the quaint little cathedral city in which I live is entering the 21st century, but all of a sudden coffee chains have started invading and sprouting their spawn left, right and centre. We currently have two Costa Coffees and one Caffe Nero on the high street (with another Caffe Nero on the way), a local-ish chain called Boston Tea Party just off the high street and apparently there’s also a Starbucks nearby — not to mention countless small non-chain coffee shops.

I don’t live in a particularly large city (population of ~111,000) and the town centre is relatively compact so it’s only a 5-minute walk from one Costa to the other (and the same goes for the Neros); is the demand for relatively exotic coffee (well, exotic in comparison to yer bog-standard British cuppa anyway) really that high? I suppose being a cathedral city attracts a lot of visitors so there’s all that tourist cash to be extracted from their garish bum-bags but surely trade will nose-dive once summer has passed? Still, I know very little about business which is no doubt why they’re running thriving coffee franchises while I’m writing a blog for pennies a day; maybe I ought to leave it to the experts.

More to the point, perhaps I ought to stop having a medium skinny Fairtrade mocha (with either a spicy meatball panini or a lemon and white chocolate muffin, depending on how savoury I’m feeling) when I’m in town on a Saturday afternoon, thus lining their pockets with what ought to be lining mine; in fact, I can save up what I’d normally spend on coffee and use it to start my own franchised coffee shop. That’ll show them!

For me, the music of 1990 is best summed up by Telstar’s Deep Heat 90 compilation. Looking back, a lot of it was undoubtedly a bit on the poor side; nobody could argue that “The Only Rhyme That Bitessssssssss” was 808 State’s finest hour, and as it turned out, the 1990s weren’t the time for the Guru. But still, to my 12-year-old self it was the epitome of cool; I mean, surely nothing could be better than a housed-up version of The Prisoner’s signature tune?

Turns out I was wrong; if only I’d been in possession of the track that spawned this little beauty:

Check out your local dealer, not for drugs, but for Sega!

Fucking marvellous.

Phil at Squash hits the nail squarely on the head regarding April Fool blog posts:

Was it me or did every single blog in the universe just take advantage of the fact that now that any one can publish it means that we all have the means and wherewithall to prove just how not funny and unimaginative we are.

Hear, hear. I believe only two or three more posts about some blog being bought out by a rival blog network or a site receiving a “comedy” makeover would have been enough to send the entire blogosphere — if not the whole internet — into a self-referential, self-congratulatory mastubatory meltdown.

On the other hand, there are still some people doing decent April Fool posts; witness Lyris’s effort. It’s relevant to the site and actually amusing to boot; this is how it’s done, guys!