non-wine
From my window I can see the snow falling. Food is being prepared. Christmas wine delights sorted. It is time to wish all of you a wonderful and very Merry Christmas!
What could be better than this peacful tune played by the importantly talented Schroeder:
Imagine you want to go to one of the world's finest restaurants, but they (almost) won't let you because, no, not because they don't like your dress or credit card, but because you don't own a fax machine. Sounds strange? Not if you are Gordon Ramsay.
I love wine. I love food. I love to combine them and as often as possible I head out to try potentially exciting restaurants, of which London is full. It just so happens that I rarely write about it, mostly because I enjoy the experience so much that I do not want to take notes or annoy other guest by taking photographs. Because of this, my first posting on a fine dining experience is a negative one - a lesson about how one of the world's finest restaurants annoys customers and even puts their money at risk through a stupid booking procedure. Put your hands together for Gordon Ramsay's three Michelin star restaurant in Royal Hospital Road, London.
This second, sadly wine-free, instalment of the series on how to fight comment spam (read the first here) is looking into identifying and fighting spammers in a slightly different way. While the method I describe in this posting is not for everyone, the information may still be of interest to you, especially if you want to understand how many visitors your website has, what Google Analytics does, what server logfiles are and how to interpret these numbers through software such as Webalizer or AWStats.
Like most bloggers we are curious to know who is reading our blog. Some of our readers we know through the comments they leave, emails that they send, through Twitter or even personal contacts - which, I hasten to add, makes them more than just 'readers' but partners in a conversation. Even so, as a blogger you also want to know about those who just read your blog and do not directly engage with you – maybe to boost your ego ('Hundred people visit my blog every day.') or because you want to know if you are doing a good job engaging the visitors, i.e.: do they return? do they spend much time on the site? what proportion of your readers leave comments? where are they from?
Basically, there are three ways of finding out about this. [read the full post...]
As you will have gathered from the heading, I am not writing about wine today. Instead I deal with an unpleasant topic that most bloggers struggle with: comment or blog spam and how to fight it. Like most blogs, the Wine Rambler is targeted by a spammers who aim to get as many links to their websites distributed across the Internet so that they can make more money from selling rubbish products. Comment forms on blogs are an easy target as they were designed to make it easy for people to leave comments with links attached to them. To make their dirty work easier, spammers use more or less sophisticated software, the so called spambots (spam robots), to trawl the Internet for any comment or mail form they can find and then bombard it with spam. We get dozens, sometimes hundreds of these visitors per day and eventually decided it was time to do something about it.
example of comment spam
Today I do not feel like wine. In fact, I am drinking a lager, imported to London all the way from Munich - where they know damn well how to make good beer - and I am in the mood for Christmas. So I am going to share this little miracle, featuring one of my all-time heroes:
Autumn sun. Full moon. And now's the time, the time is now, to sing my song: Ramble On.
Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way.
Thanks to you, I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.
But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.
For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it's headed my way.
Sometimes I grow so tired, but I know I've got one thing I got to do...Ramble On, And now's the time, the time is now, to sing my song.
I'm goin' 'round the world, I got to find my girl, on my way.
I've been this way ten years to the day, Ramble On,
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams.Got no time to for spreadin' roots, The time has come to be gone.
And to' our health we drank a thousand times, it's time to Ramble On.
I like this clip with the cheesy radio presenter leading into a gripping "Alabama High Test" by bluegrass neo-traditionalists Old Crow Medicine Show - some really psychedelic fiddle playing. Enjoy!
Thought it'd be nice to have some music here from time to time, to go with all that wine.
And it's my great honour to have a real legend of american music open this segment: This charming little video captures the great folk musician Doc Watson in a guitar maker's workshop, obviously trying out a new instrument.
"Telling my troubles to my old guitar" is just a harmlessly swinging Chet Atkins tune. But in Doc's off-the-cuff-version, this becomes a little marvel of thumping guitar strings and stoic perfection.
And I dare say my co-rambler Torsten will enjoy the little hint of a yodel at the end.
As financial crisis and parliamentary greed rise to engulf Britain, the comedian John Oliver defines Britishness in a world that seems stacked against it...
(WARNING: RATHER IMMATURE HUMOUR, MAY NOT BE "SAFE FOR WORK")