Site Down

 It's a fucking disaster.  The Sleaze is currently down, deactivated by the host due to a 'payment failure'.  This, despite the fact that I had an automatic renewal set up - which I checked only recently.  The host, it seems, left it to the last minute to try and get the payment, then e-mailed me warning the site could be deactivated, which it did so about a half hour later!  Sending e-mails in the early hours expecting a response is hardly constructive, or good business practice.  I've now paid with my card, yet the site is still down.  You've got your fucking money, now give me what I'm paying for!  (If they can expect a response to their e-mail, I don't think I'm being unreasonable for them to restore the site immediately upon payment).  This situation really is intolerable.  Ordinarily, I'd just move the site elsewhere, but in this instance, with their actions being so swift and unheralded, I haven't had the chance to download a backup of the files and databases, so I have no choice but to pay as my entire site is now, in effect, being held hostage.  Really, you'd think that in situations like this you'd either get more warning or a grace period in the case of a 'failed payment' in order to rectify their error, (payment, after all, had been set up).

I've only been with this host for a year and until now, things had been running smoothly, but now I'm reviewing the situation (and downloading a back up as soon as I get access again).  I suppose that I should have expected this, as a while ago, the service was sold to a new owner.  My previous experiences of hosts changing hands should have tipped me off to the possibility of this sort of shit: all too often such takeovers lead to a deterioration in the services you are paying for.  So it looks as if, once I regain control of the site, I'll have to start the tedious search for yet another new host.  If I'm quick enough, I might be able to get at least part of this year's fee back,  Otherwise I'll be looking to next year to move the site, again.  A quick check, but no, it's still down.  It's amazing how quick they are to disable the account, yet drag their feet when it comes to restoring it.  I've tried raising a support ticket (still unanswered) and their 24/7 help chat - which just gave an automatic reply telling me to raise a support ticket.  Come on guys, this is unacceptable, you've got your money, now give me back my site.  Really, if it isn't back up soon, then I'm going to start naming and shaming the bastards.

Site on the Run

I've had a fun time lately, moving The Sleaze to a new host.  It's a move that's been a long time in gestation, but ended being forced on me at relatively short notice.  I've been increasingly unhappy with my previous host for a long time now - steeply increasing prices accompanied by sharply decreasing levels of reliability and support.  It's the sad story that afflicts many web hosting companies: corporate takeovers.  When I first moved to this host, they were a medium sized company relatively local to me who offered decent support for a reasonable price.  They turned out to be far more reliable that my previous host.  Inevitably, though, they were taken over by a larger company, but still maintained better than average services and support for the price.  Then they were taken over, yet, again, by a larger, pan-European hosting firm that managed brands across the continent.  Which was when things started to decline, with support pared back to a minimum and a distinct lack or reliability, all accompanied by rising prices. Unfortunately, the features offered by their hosting packages didn't increase to match their prices - much of what other hosts were offering as standard were extra.  Very expensively extra.  Then the parent company was bought by GoDaddy and things really went downhill, culminating in the announcement, last week, that a long promised upgrading and move to new servers was going to happen within seven days - but at a cost.  The cost of hosting was to double, yet still all the stuff that other hosting companies would include for standard at that price was still extra.  (They'd already just taken full payment for the next year's hosting at the old prices).  So, I was forced to finally move the site away.

The problem has been finding, at such short notice, a new host that would charge me less, but still provide decent service and offer as part of the price all the stuff that the other guys wanted extra payments for.  The reality is that moving to a new host is always a risk - you don't really know how good or bad they'll be until you are actually there.  After considering various big hosting companies - most of which wouldn't have saved me much money, but would at least have included as standard the features that I would otherwise have had to pay extra for if I'd stayed put - I eventually decided to take a gamble on a much smaller outfit with, as yet, not much of web presence or reputation, but who offered reasonably priced hosting packages which included pretty much everything I required.  They also don't mislead with those 'introductory offers' of low prices for the first year's hosting, with steep price rises after that.  Plus, as an added bonus, they claim to be eco-friendly, using green energy and supporting green charities.  

So, yesterday, the site moved to this new home.  From the point of view of visitors, the only visible difference is that the site is now served as 'https' rather than 'http' - which means, in practice, that the little padlock symbol in the browser address bar is now locked.  I have to say, that the move to force site owners to go to 'https', for which you need an SSL certificate installed by your host, is one of the biggest cons in the history of the net.  Sure, in theory, it makes sites more secure. But, if like me, you aren't selling stuff and therefore enabling financial transactions, or asking for users' details for subscriptions or memberships, it makes no difference whatsoever.  But with search engines, principally Google, threatening to not rank sites without an SSL certificate, regardless of content, most site owners feel obligated to fork out yet more money for a certificate and having it installed.  But the new host offers this service as standard, (unlike the old host), so I might as well take advantage.  

It's too early to say whether this new host is going to be a success for the site, but so far, so good.  There were some problems with the site migration, but that was mainly down to my idiocy in trying to use the wrong credentials to access the old site.  Having used cPanel for so long, the move to a different type of control panel feels somewhat daunting, but I'm getting there.  Obviously, these new guys could be bought out by some corporate giant tomorrow, putting me back to square one, but that's always the risk you take with smaller hosts.  Overall, though, there's a lot to be said for using smaller web hosting firms, particularly if, like me, you are running a small, independent site that isn't geared to e-commerce.  Not only is it more cost effective, but you generally get a more personal touch when you deal with them - something I'd come to miss with my previous hosts.

Cutting and Pasting

As I've mentioned before, I'm fascinated by what I refer to as 'Cut and Paste' filmmaking, whereby footage from one film is incorporated into another, or two different films are combined to create a new film, sometimes with new footage added, or even where one film is transformed into a new entity, by adding new footage.  One of the masters of this was the late Al Adamson, who regularly reworked one film into another over a period of years, (Psycho-a-Go-Go (1965), which was re-edited with added new footage into Fiend With the Electronic Brain (1969), which in turn was further re-edited and had more new footage added to become Blood of Ghastly Horror (1971), being the prime example).  Going back further, in the late forties Republic Pictures cut costs on the production of new serials by building each  new one around the action sequences from two earlier serials,matching the costumes of the new cast to those in the earlier serials.  Such practices were also common among B-movie producers.  Anyway, getting to the point, I indulged in a bit of 'cut and paste' story creation the other day, over on The Sleaze.  It's been a while since I did this but, while going through my old document files, I came across a story I didn't recall ever posting, yet still felt familiar, (not familiar in the sense that I'd written it, just that parts of it reminded me of something else I recalled posting).  After some investigation, I found that I'd incorporated a rewritten version of some of this into a new narrative framework for a story published many years ago.  

I eventually recalled that I'd abandoned the original, which was only meant to be one half of a story when I realised that I couldn't do the idea justice at such a short length and opted instead to expand the other half into a complete story.  So, being in one of those moods when really didn't feel like starting a new story for The Sleaze from scratch, (I'd been having a very frustrating week in which I'd seemed to run around a lot without actually achieving anything), I decided to finally rework this old story - after a delay of over a decade - instead.  After removing any dated references, the story ended up with a new opening, placing it in a more contemporary context, some rearranged text and some additional material which had occurred to me as i read the original version.  The end result was a pretty passable story which I was happy to publish as it was sufficiently different from the version previously posted..  It wasn't so much time that it saved me, as intellectual effort.  Whilst I'm still not the Al Adamson of vaguely satirical stories, it was still a satisfying exercise.  I used to do this more in the past, particularly when the site switched to Wordpress, taking the opportunity to rewrite and refurbish some older material to make it more contemporary.  Also, in the early days of the site, quite a lot of stories were extensively rewritten versions of stuff that had originally appeared in its short-lived and obscure print version, produced to amuse work colleagues, (circulation approximately ten). 

Signs of Life?

OK, just a quick update on the current state of The Sleaze, following Friday's downbeat assessment of the traffic situation with regard to Google.  I decided to apply some logic to the problem, taking the non-indexing of posts by Google News as my starting point.  Bearing in mind that Google is currently favouring Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which have extremely simple code, supposedly for faster loading om mobile devices, in its news index, it seemed a reasonable assumption that the current version of the Google News bot was geared to read and index pages with simpler code.  Indeed, I do already produce AMP versions of posts, which Google seemed to be indexing (although, as they are treated as being specifically for mobile devices, they aren't visibly indexed in any of Google's main indexes).  So, it seemed logical that the 'content too short' error messages could be the result of the bot mistaking the first blocks of text it came to in the page code for content, rather than, say, just meta tags or sidebar content.  Consequently, I decided to take drastic action, switching the theme over to one I knew had simpler code on its post pages, as it was designed to be fully responsive on mobile devices.

Now, I have to say that I really don't like the resulting new look of The Sleaze, (although 'd been playing around with the new theme off line for some time, with a view to using it on the live site), but it has yielded results.  Within minutes of the switch, I'd persuaded Google to index six previously rejected posts in its News Index.  By this evening, it had correctly re-indexed over a hundred pages in the News Index.  In overall traffic terms, there has been an improvement.  Nothing spectacular, but Google referrals have definitely increased since the theme switch.    Of course, this is just one day and it would be dangerous to make any assumptions on the basis of these recent stats.  However, I think that there might be grounds for cautious optimism.  (Having said that, traffic will probably crash again tomorrow, the way things have been going).  Whilst the site isn't off of life support yet, it is, at least, still breathing.

A Hundred Issues of Sleaze

Another landmark achieved for The Sleaze - if we still ran the old numbered issue system, the most recently posted story would mark the beginning of our hundredth issue.  Which probably requires a degree of explanation for those who don't recall the earliest days of The Sleaze. Back when the site started, some sixteen years ago, the web was still young and nobody had any idea how publications should be run online - the current convention of sites being updated on a post by post basis wasn't universal, (the rise of the blog probably helped cement this convention).  Consequently, some of us initially tried to replicate the offline print conventions of sites being published as 'issues', entirely updated on a monthly basis, like a magazine. Whilst The Sleaze was originally monthly, it quickly moved to bi-monthly, as writing an entire issue's worth of stories and editorial content in one go was just too time consuming.  After a couple of years we finally adopted the blogging convention of publishing one article at a time.  However, the old system was still reflected in the numbering scheme for the stories and the publishing schedule for editorials (which still appear every other month). 

So, with 'Issue 99' having encompassed the stories published during February and March, (all of their suffix numbers in their URLs started '99', with the the third digit reflecting their place in the running order, although I sometimes get confused and assign the wrong running number), we must now be at 'Issue 100'.  Which is quite an achievement, considering that when we started, I thought that I'd be lucky to come up with enough material for ten issues.  Of course, The Sleaze has changed a lot since the first issue, most notably in having shifted from being a series of static pages to the current Wordpress-based site, but so has the web itself.  Back in April 2000 when the site first went live, there was no social media: no Twitter, no Facebook.  The mobile web didn't exist, connections were all dial up, speeds snail like compared to today and the idea of streaming audio or visual files online seemed a distant dream.  Nowadays, even my TV is internet connected and I regularly watch films  streamed from the web on it.  But some things never change:  The Sleaze still doesn't allow commenting on stories and makes emailing the editor as difficult as possible and I have no plans to change this.  Some traditions have to be adhered to...

Another Christmas Eve

So, here we are. Christmas Eve.  The day itself, which everyone has been exhausting themselves preparing for is only hours away.  The shops have shut, so if you haven't managed to buy it now, you'll have to do without until they reopen.  Which seems like it will be an eternity, but in reality, many will be open again on Boxing Day.  I've been off work since about five thirty on Tuesday and I've already lost track as to which day of the week it is, which simply adds to the sensation of normal time being suspended, which you often experience over holiday periods.  All my preparations are now done - decorations up, sausage rolls cooked, beer supplies stocked up and presents dispatched - so I'm on my sofa, drinking tea, eating cheese and crackers and watching Mondo Cane again, still captivated by Riz Orlotani's magnificent musical score. 

I have to say that I'm feeling pretty smug at the moment.  Not only did I have all my essential seasonal provisions bought well in advance this year, but, unlike last Christmas, when I was felled by an extremely bad cold the weekend before, I actually completed my seasonal web publishing plan.  Not only did I get the annual Crapchester Christmas lights video up, but I also managed to complete a Christmas-themed story for The Sleaze and, most incredibly, record an all-new episode of 'The Sleazecast'.   You can find the latter - 'A Sleazecast Christmas Carol' - over on the Overnightscape Central.  I'll eventually get around to posting it properly here.  It's hard to believe that producing twenty five minutes of audio can be so time-consuming, but I was up to four in the morning Tuesday into Wednesday night editing the last few segments so that I would be able to assemble the whole thing next afternoon. 

So, I've done all the hard work, I spent the afternoon watching It's a Wonderful Life and getting all emotional over it again, (partly out of guilt, for the way in which I'd cannibalised a radio version of it to produce some puerile smut for the aforementioned podcast), and now I'm contemplating whether to go out or not.  I haven't yet decided.  But if I do, I think I'll head to my local for the first time in years on Christmas Eve.  Last year I got dragged out by an acquaintance who insisted on going to a pub halfway across town where we didn't know anyone and which closed early.  Not my idea of Christmas Eve fun.  So, before I go, do I have any pithy seasonal thoughts to share?  Not really, no.  Just try to kick back and enjoy yourselves - and if you lower your expectations about Christmas, as I eventually learned to do, that will be much easier.  After all, so what if it doesn't all go to plan and isn't 'perfect'?  It doesn't really matter.  See you on the other side folks.  Happy Winterval.

Same Old New Directions

A while ago I was predicting that Sleaze Diary seemed to be shifting from personal/editorial blog to a predominantly pop culture blog.  Inevitably, things have turned out differently, as they always seem to around here.  Since my prediction, the personal and political stuff has become prominent again, reflecting developments in my life and interests.  Which isn't to say that things are now moving in the opposite direction to the one I predicted.  The pop culture stuff, particularly the exploitation film side of things, has still been taking up quite a bit of my time, just not on this blog.  For the past few months I've been producing the 'Schlock Express' podcast for the 'Overnightscape Underground', which is aimed at bringing the world of exploitation to a non-expert audience.  With some success, I have to say.  In the main, it draws on the stuff I've already posted here as the basis for the scripts.  Nevertheless, recording and editing each edition is time consuming.  On top of that, I haven't had much time of late to catch up with all the various low-rent movies I've got queued up.  Hopefully, I'll be able to start getting up to date with my schlock backlog this weekend.

One of the things to come out of producing the 'Schlock Express' podcast is that I'm edging ever closer to trying to resume my original podcast series, 'The Sleazecast'.  The main hurdle is in coming up with a new format which isn't as labour intensive as the last couple of editions turned out to be.  I'm still working on that.  Of course, if I wasn't spending so much time being a 'terrorist sympathiser', as our Prime Minister seemes to think that anyone who doesn't support the bombing of Syria must be, I'd have more time to produce all these podcasts, run The Sleaze, watch schlock movies and write this blog.  An overriding theme of the 'debate' over Syria seems to have been that 'we can't do nothing - we must do something'.  Which is utterly nonsensical, as doing nothing is always an option, albeit not neccessarily the right one, but it is an option - so if your entire argument for bombing someone is based on such a fallacy then, to be frank, you have no credible argument. It's like that other nonsense politicians like to spout: 'the status quo is not an option'.  Of course it is a bloody option!  You can say that it one you don't want to consider, but it still exists!  Anyway, enough of these ramblings, I'm off to the pub.

Pumpkin Warfare

It must be Hallowe'en here in Crapchester - the pumpkins have started appearing.  I have to say that, compared to previous years and bearing in mind how close to the 31st we are, there are, so far, surprisingly few in evidence.  In fact, most of them seem to be concentrated here on my street. Indeed, most specifically, they all seem to be on my terrace.  For the past several years, one of my neighbours has always had a pumpkin sat on their gas meter box - sometimes they even have a lit candle in it.  But this year, not one, but two, pumpkins have appeared on their next door neighbour's gas meter box.  Could this be the start of some kind of Hallowe'en themed war?  Will the street find itself terrorised by two rival gangs of trick-or-treaters?  Will we see a fight between one kid dressed as the Wolfman and another dressed as Frankenstein's Monster?  Will there be drive by eggings?  Or could it just be down to the fact that one household has only one child and the other two, hence the disparity in pumpkin numbers?  Mind you, one pumpkin absent this year is the one from the lot who didn't invite me to their housewarming barbecue, (I know that I didn't want to go to it anyway, but it still rankles that I was snubbed), and, less than a year after moving in have moved out.  Last year they typically had some sophisticated electronic illuminated plastic pumpkin.  Pretentious bastards.

At least we don't usually get troubled by trick-or-treaters up on this terrace.  But this year Hallowe'en is a Saturday, so I suppose that the little bastards will have more time on their hands, increasing the risk factor.  Plus, there's always the possibility that the cats which have moved into number five will come round trick-or-treating.  Probably wearing scary dog masks and demanding fish.  When I say that cats have moved into number five, I don't mean that they're giving mortgages to felines nowadays.  Obviously, I mean that someone with cats has moved into the house - which, incidentally, has stood empty for nigh on twenty years.  Getting back to the subject of Hallowe'en, I'm hoping to use the occasion as an excuse to finally catch up with a couple of films I recorded from the Horror Channel over the past few weeks:  John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which I haven't seen in several years and  Cannibal Apocalypse.  I've also finally got around to posting the traditional vaguely supernatural themed story for Hallowe'en over at The Sleaze.  Which has made this a pretty busy week, as I also managed, at long last, to edit together a new podcast for the Overnightscape Underground.  All I need to do now is negotiate the Mexican-style 'Day of the Dead' event that's being staged in Crapchester town centre late tomorrow afternoon as I try to get to the Tesco Metro for some essential shopping. Wish me luck.

Happy Holidays

If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm on holiday this week.  And next week, for that matter.  Not that these were actually the weeks I wanted to take off, but, for various work-related reasons, I was pretty much bounced into taking them off (I'd rather take my main Summer break later in August - the weather is usually better).  Consequently, it all feels as if I've been rushed into taking my break without having made any proper plans.  Add to that the fact that, despite forecasts to the opposite, I've so far had to endure two consecutive days of rain.  To make things worse, despite originally indicating that next week would be sunny, the Met Office has changed its mind and decided that it will rain, instead.  All of which means that my entire break could prove to be a washout.  The only possible bright spot is that I also have the August Bank Holiday week off - perhaps early September will bring better weather.  Yes, I know, that means that I'm off for two weeks, back at work for a week, then off again for a week - it's all down to the fact that my taking my usual consecutive three weeks off in late August, early September last year caused such offence to some managers that I decided to split it this year.  Stick that in your pipes and smoke it, is my attitude.

So, as a result of all this nonsense, I ended up spending a rainy day on the beach, walking up and down a narrow spit of shingle to look at a lighthouse and a castle.  At least the poor weather meant there weren't many kids about and that it was easy to park.  I also discovered that you can get stronger 4G coverage at Hurst Point than you can get in many parts of Crapchester.  I'm hoping for better weather tomorrow, so as to enable me to take a long ramble around part of the New Forest I haven't visited in a while (and maybe take in another beach).  What my holidays - which will, hopefully, consist of my usual drift around bits of the South Coast and adjoining areas - will mean in practical terms is that posting around here might become a bit intermittent over the next couple of weeks.  Whilst I'm off wok I'd like to take turn my creative energies to a couple of other projects. That said, I'll be trying to keep The Sleaze updated with a couple of new stories.  I'm also hoping to find time to watch some more reprehensible movies, which, as ever, I'll faithfully write up here.  Anyway, that's enough rambling for now.  Back to my holiday.

Hacking Back

I think that it is obvious to all that I've been at sixes and sevens of late with regard to this blog: no sense of direction, posts all over the place, stuff I keep promising not appearing - that in-depth look at Mondo Movies, for instance.  This, in large part, is down to me trying to juggle several things at once - that long-mooted schlock movie blog, devising new strategies to prop up traffic over at The Sleaze, tracking down and watching obscure films, mulling over whether to go ahead with a new podcast series.  However, I have at least dealt with one pressing problem: that bloody persistent Ukrainian hacker who keeps launching brute force attacks against The Sleaze. I mentioned him a couple of months ago - he's the incompetent who can't even find the correct address for the login page, hitting a non-existent page instead.  Last time he spent the better part of 48 hours hammering my site with an automated script trying to break in by trying combinations of guessed passwords and user IDs, except that he'd pointed the script at the wrong page.  Undeterred, he kept going even after I'd blocked his IP address.  The trouble is that, whether he was hitting a non-existent page or being bounced off the site, it was eating up my bandwidth and slowing the site down.

Anyway, he came back mid-week (the IP address was from the same range and ISP as the one I had banned) and started hammering away at the non-existent login page (he just doesn't learn), again, I blocked his IP, but he just got ever more aggressive, upping the tempo of his script to attack the site every second or so.  Suddenly a solution occurred to me: as the page he was hitting didn't exist, I could safely put a redirect on it and, as I had his IP address from my server logs, it seemed obvious that that should be the destination of the redirect.  Which meant, in practice, that I was looping his attacks back against him: every time he hammered my site, he was also hitting himself.  Not surprisingly, within five minutes of setting up the redirect and lifting the block on his IP address, he ceased and desisted his activities.  And he hasn't been back.  So far.  Hopefully he's finally learned something - some of us site owners bite back.  Not that this victory means that I can afford to get complacent about the threat posed by these bastards - I've also activated various other security precautions to foil their activities.  Which seem, so far, to be working - there's been a significant drop in the volume of brute force attacks on my login since I put these measures in place.

As for the other things distracting me - well, traffic to The Sleaze has had a temporary boost by changing tack with the stories.  After a long string of political satire stories throughout the general election, which only did middling business traffic-wise and a couple of politics-related stories post-election which performed disappointingly, I put up a silly conspiracy story about the 'Titanic' and hit the jackpot.  It's always the way - those lovingly crafted witty and intellectual satire pieces are always outperformed by smut and conspiracies.  The success of the 'Titanic' story pretty much vindicates my recent decision to change direction with stories over at The Sleaze - less politics for a while and a return, instead, to the kind of weird and surreal stuff which used to dominate the site.  Away from The Sleaze, I'm still working on that new schlock site, although the obscure movie watching is on a bit of a hiatus at the moment: not only have I recently OD'd on Mondo movies, but I need a breathing space to start writing up some of the stuff I've seen.  On a related note, I'm still mulling over a schlock move podcast to accompany the new site.  Hopefully I can get a bit more focussed here, as well.

A Change of Season

The car's service didn't cost me anything like as much as I feared it would, so maybe things are looking up.  I mean, I wasn't electrocuted over the weekend by my faulty laptop mains charger cable - the insulation on the end which plugs into the laptop had split, exposing the wire inside.  There were, quite literally, sparks flying off of it when I picked the laptop up to move it on Thursday evening.  Pretty scary stuff.  But as Lenovo have changed to using a USB-shaped connector for their charger cables none of my other chargers was compatible.  So, after ordering a replacement charger on line, I wrapped insulation tape around the split and carried on using it over the bank holiday weekend.  Sure, it crackled every time I moved the laptop, but it held and I didn't get a shock.  I like living dangerously.  Anyway, the replacement arrived this morning, so everything's OK now.  I also managed to put another coat of paint on the ceilings of both the kitchen and spare room today - both projects are inching towards completion.  It will be particularly gratifying when the spare room's refurbishment is complete, as I'll be able to start setting up the model railway in there again.  Believe me, the problems of track geometry, gradients and signalling can provide a welcome relief from the crap I deal with at work. 

But enough of the domestic updates.  With everything going on, both in my life and in the outside world, it feels as if we're about to embark on a new 'season' (to use US TV terminology).  So, perhaps this is a good time to look forward to what I'm planning for the near future here on Sleaze Diary.  Basically, more of the same but with a greater emphasis on the obscure and arcane films.  Of late I've been watching an insane number of such movies and I'm planning to watch a lot more.  Whilst I'll continue discussing them here, I'm thinking more and more of setting up a new site devoted entirely to schlock, cinematic or otherwise, where I can look at this stuff in greater detail.  I'm also coming around to the idea of producing that schlock movie podcast I piloted over at the Overnightscape Underground recently, on a regular basis.  There's even an outside chance that I might finally crank out another episode of 'The Sleazecast'.  As to where I'm going to find the time for all this, well, after last week's developments, I intend adjusting my work hours - no more late working and unpaid overtime.  But before we can do anything else, we've first got to get through the general election on Thursday and its undoubtedly messy aftermath, which, I suspect, will keep me occupied for a while.

Divisive Discussions

So, I finally came up with a new story for The Sleaze: I'm Blacking Britain!  It concerns activists blacking up right wing politicians to raise awareness of racial prejudice.  By a strange coincidence, there was a story in the papers today about former footballer Sol Campbell 'whiting up', apparently in order to challenge perceptions of race.  Didn't he do something similar before, when, as a Spurs player he wore that Arsenal shirt for several seasons?  Oh no, that wasn't to challenge people's perceptions about tribalism in football, but rather about money and glory hunting.  I'm not sure what I find most offensive about Campbell: the fact that he left Spurs and signed for Arsenal, or the fact that he's now campaigning for the Tories.  Actually, I think it's the fact that he's a Tory - it shows that he's completely lost sight of his origins - which shouldn't surprise us with regard to someone who can move from Spurs to the Arse and apparently not understand why his former fans at Spurs hate him. 

Ah, football and politics - two things guaranteed to result in conflict.  Perhaps only religion can do more to divide people.  Which is why all three are topics probably best avoided in polite company.  Luckily, we're not in polite company here, so we can discuss these things to our hearts' content.  I say 'discuss', but in reality this is just me ranting.  But it is interesting just how polarising these things can be - for all my talk of the need to tolerate other people's beliefs, even when they clash with our own, every time someone tells me they vote Tory I think 'what a tosser'.  (I'm sure they think the same about me).  It's even worse if I see one of those 'I'm Voting UKIP' signs in someone's window - I just have this urge to throw a brick through it.  I have similar reactions to religious types who try to force their beliefs down my throat: 'sanctimonious gits', I think.  As for Arsenal supporters, well, that goes without saying: 'arseholes'.  (To be fair, these days I find myself hating those smug nouveau rich gits at Chelsea more).  Of course, being tolerant, I don't say any of these things out loud, I just think them.  But perhaps that's the problem with us tolerant types: we don't vocalise our feelings enough, for fear of offending, which just allows the offensive arseholes to shout their bile at will.   

Portable Sleaze

I can't decide whether it's because I'm getting old or simply because my life is otherwise bereft of excitement that last weekend I found myself getting so enthusiastic about making The Sleaze mobile-friendly.  Maybe it was a combination of the two as, in the cold light of day, it is obvious that it was a surprisingly time-consuming and repetitive task involving very little actual creativity or problem solving.  One of the advantages of The Sleaze being Wordpress-based these days is that virtually any kind of modifications or improvements in functionality can be achieved via plugins.  The key is finding the right plugin amongst the plethora offered via the official Wordpress site.  Eventually, I narrowed it down to two possibilities for creating a mobile-friendly version of the site:  WP Touch and Smart WP. 

In truth, the latter had more and better-looking mobile templates in its free version and was simpler to set up, but I ended up using WP Touch instead.  The clincher was that Smart WP simply didn't report usage stats properly - when the site was viewed with a mobile device my tracking services simply showed a generic page title - 'thesleaze' - regardless of which page was being viewed.  This would have rendered my site stats meaningless, as knowing which pages are the most popular and the paths visitors are following when reading the site are key pieces of information.  WP Touch, by contrast, gave full details of the pages looked at by visitors using mobile devices.  So I installed their plugin.  Which is ironic as I'd previously removed it from the site after my last attempt, several years ago, to make it mobile-friendly, due to the fact that, back then, the plugin kept 'breaking' the stats codes, rendering them inoperative and thereby rendering mobile visitors invisible to me. It seems that this problem has been addressed in more recent versions of the plugin as mobile visitors have been fully visible since installing it.

Not actually owning a smartphone myself, I had to do all my testing using online mobile phone emulators - a truly tedious task.  However, the upshot of all this is that if you now view The Sleaze via mobile device (excepting tablets, as the regular template displays OK for such devices) you should see it in a format more suited to such media.  You might well ask why this sudden desire to make the site mobile-friendly?  Well, it all comes down to the Great God Google whom we all must appease or risk being forced off of the web, which has decreed that those sites it decides aren't mobile-friendly will be penalised in search results.  Hence the installation of WP Touch.  Hopefully, this will only be a stop-gap solution until I'm able to find a suitable fully responsive template, which will be able to provide a suitable display for any type of device it is viewed in, for The Sleaze.

Down and Out

I haven't moaned about Google and its destruction of my web traffic for a long time now.  But as, today, it seems to have decided that I should get no traffic whatsoever, I thought that I'd abandon my planned post and instead make another public attack on the tax dodging, privacy invading, copyright infringing corporate behemoth that Google has become.  The most ludicrous thing about the total lack of visitors today is that only a couple of weeks ago The Sleaze was enjoying a fantastic run of popularity.  But, as I've noted before, these days there is always a price to be paid for such success: no bit of good fortune can ever go unpunished by Google.  Part of the problem is that as soon as Google sees that you are gaining some kind of popularity, they decide that they are entitled to piece of that pie.  Which, in practice, means that they start sending you e-mails offering all sorts of deals and discounts on adwords, implying that if you activate (or reactivate in my case) this service, you'll attract lots more traffic.  They also clearly hope that you'll then start taking their ads on your site.  Either way, Google gets to make money from your site.  Now, I once ran a trial with adwords and it brought me no traffic whatsoever.  It simply isn't suited to a site like The Sleaze.  So, I shut down the account.  But, as I've indicated, they keep coming back and trying to get me to reactivate the account.

Maybe it's just coincidence - as many SEO types keep telling me - but every time they make one of these approaches and I ignore it, my traffic from Google falls off of a cliff.  And guess what?  That's right, at the height of my recent bump in traffic, I got such an e-mail, which, as usual, I ignored.  Since then, traffic has gone into rapid decline.  Today is the worst day in over a year - tonight, for example, there hasn't been a single visitor since 18:44.  That's more than three hours.  Utterly ridiculous!  To put that in perspective, only a few years ago, we were getting 15-20 unique visitors an hour.  It seems clear, that in attempt to convince me that an advertising campaign is essential for the site's survival, my pages have been deranked from their most popular keywords and buried so deep in search results that nobody can find them.  If the usual pattern prevails, in another week or so I might start to see some recovery as they accept that, once again, their bullying isn't going to work.  I'm simply not interested in using adwords again. 

Compounding this problem is that fact that Google is increasingly filling the first pages of search results with sites which aren't necessarily the most relevant, but have 'authority', in other words big corporate sites like Amazon, Ebay and the like.  In the past, search terms like 'political satire', say, for which we ranked highly, seemed immune to this trend.  Sure, such search terms don't bring much traffic, but is fairly steady.  However, when I checked these results the other day, I found them dominated by entries from non-satire sites like the Huffington Post, which simply mention political satire.  Genuine satire sites had largely been relegated to page two or three, (we're still hanging in somewhere near the bottom of page one).  If you run the same search on Bing, for instance, you'll find all the actual satire sites present and correct, as they should be.  But as  far as Google is concerned, the Huffington Post is an 'authority' site which, although it isn't a satire site, mentions the search term, so that gives it priority over more relevant sites in the results.

If this means that small, independent, non-ad carrying sites are killed off, well, tough, seems to be Google's attitude.  As far as they are concerned, they are the web and they get to decide what is and isn't relevant to your search.  Which means, in practice, that they get to decide what the average web user can or can't see.  Their near-monopoly in search means that they can effectively impose their vision of the web, which seems to be a glorified shopping mall full of bland and mediocre sites with scraped or spun content, on the world.  This latest 'punishment' they've handed out to me has, to all and intents and purposes, killed The Sleaze.  There's no point in having a site that nobody is allowed to see.  Trust me, if I relied upon The Sleaze as a revenue source, then I would have been forced to fold it two or three years ago.  However, it isn't a commercial site, so I struggle on, no matter how soul-destroying it is to see the traffic I spent years building being stripped away and original content going unread.  If nothing else, sheer bloody mindedness means that I won't be bullied off of the web by Google.  My site has been around longer than them and at least uses original material rather than ripping off other people's material to make money.  So, come on you evil bastards - you've killed my traffic, but I'm still here, what are you going to try next?  Bring it on, bastards.

Friday Ramblings

You know, I'm growing tired of people dissing August.  Of late I've heard it referred to as the 'Sunday of Summer' because it is the last month of the season.  This has been accompanied by numerous references to the fact that the fact that it is August is a constant reminder that Summer is almost over, which is why it is impossible enjoy August. All of which is utter bollocks.  August is the best month of Summer.  It is high Summer.  It is the month which frequently features the highest temperatures and clearest skies.  There's nothing like a clear blue August sky - particularly when contrasted with a beautiful golden corn field.  August is all about childhood memories of trips to the beach - the smell of damp towels and soggy sandwiches from a plastic lunchbox with a seal down lid.  Which is why, to this day, I take my Summer break during August  (this year's, as of this evening, is now underway). 

August, with its long lazy days and all-month carefree holiday feel, is also the 'silly season', when newspapers traditionally fill their pages with tales of flying saucers, sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster.  Just today, The Guardian's G2 section carried a UFO-related story, for instance. If you hadn't noticed, 'silly season' is in full swing over at The Sleaze right now with our latest story, Right is Wrong offering the ultimate expression of the crackpot conspiracies I've been discussing here of late.  That was preceded by Taking Liberties, about the UK's latest surveillance laws and their use by ministers as a cover for their peeping Tom activities.  Coming up, I'm working on something about Hitler and mummies - I'm looking for a topical hook to hang it on.  If I can do that, it will be the next story up.  There are also plans for another look at the world of celebrity sex offenders before August is out.  So, there you have it - lots of reasons to love August.  So lay off, August haters!  

World Cup Woes

Well, the World Cup is upon us at last.  (They're just kicking off as I type this).  Which means that for the next few weeks nobody will be reading anything I post here or at The Sleaze.  I know there's no logical reason why web traffic to non-World Cup related sites should fall so drastically when the event is on, but past precedent tells me that every time there's a major sporting event on during the Summer, my web traffic, (what's left of it these days), goes south.  Sure, when matches are being shown live, I'd expect traffic from the countries involved to dip significantly, but at the end of the day, just because there's a global sporting event in progress, there's no reason for people to stop searching for the stuff that brings them to non-sporting sites.  I suspect that it is all down to google adjusting their algorithm during such events to favour related sites regardless of their relevance to the search term.  They supposedly do something similar to 'seasonally adjust' their search results at Christmas.

Anyway, this inevitable lull in traffic give me the perfect excuse to slacken off the current pace of updates to The Sleaze.  We've been averaging a story a week since the New Year and I'm running out of steam.  I need a break.  There are other projects I want to work on, not only that, but it's Summer and I'd like to get out and enjoy the good weather.  I was planning to slow down , anyway.  The only reason I've kept up the current schedule of updates was to help out the reincarnated Humorfeed, but the new members there are turning out more than sufficient stories to keep it going and attract traffic.  So, I'm going to take it easy over the Summer months and cut back to three new stories a month (plus editorials and any other features I come up with) over at The Sleaze.  Then again, I might suddenly be struck with inspiration and start cranking out stuff at an even faster rate.  Who knows?

Hurrah for Humorfeed!

So, there I was, preparing a post about how I was going to scale back my commitments to The Sleaze, maybe even put on a hiatus for a while - after all, a large proportion of its contemporaries amongst satire sites are currently inactive or defunct - when, out of the blue, I receive news that plans are afoot to revive the fortunes of Humorfeed.   Over the past few years I've announced the death of Humorfeed on several occasions, only to be proven wrong.  The site has limped along, with fewer and fewer contributors as fatigue, Google's decimation of organic traffic and ennui have taken their toll on the roster of satire sites, with, effectively, no one at the tiller.  However, the captain and officers are now back on deck and the site has a new sense of direction.  Hopefully, as well as eventually generating some non-organic traffic to the online satire world, it can also provide a much needed focus for the satire community.  In view of this, I'm left reconsidering my plans for The Sleaze.

I'd never intended to take the site offline, but in the face of ever declining traffic thanks to Google's constant de-ranking from its search results of smaller and independent websites (including, last week, the absolutely worst traffic I've seen in over ten years), it has become clear that simply publishing good quality content on a regular basis isn't enough.  The fact is that my attempts to drum up traffic and create content were taking up increasing amounts of my time and I was beginning to resent this.  There are other projects I want to pursue - I'd like to have another crack at podcasting, for instance, not to mention possibly starting a new, non-satire, site - and I can't do that whilst The Sleaze is taking up so much of my time.  The only solution, it seemed, was to reduce the amount of new content I was producing for the site and effectively putting it on the back burner, allowing it to simply tick over whilst I devoted more time to other things. 

As part of this process, I planned to use The Sleaze as a test bed for some experiments in Wordpress theme customisation.  I also planned to start shifting the focus of the site, looking at new forms of content, including shorter, up to the minute, stories and possibly some video.  All of this will probably still happen, but with the revived Humorfeed  in need of contributions as it gets back on its feet, I've decided to modify my schedule.  Whereas I had originally planned to start 'mothballing' The Sleaze at the end of March, (it will be fourteen years old come April, after all, which, in web terms, makes it decrepit), it is now more likely to be the Autumn.  That said, I will be slowing the rate of output in story terms so as to free up some time for other projects.  Hurrah for Humorfeed!

Normal Service Resumed

Normal service has been resumed and 2014 has picked up where 2013 left off: the government are being horrible right-wing bastards, the police are apparently fitting people up and getting away with murder and the press are doing their best to spread panic and despair, (the Daily Express's obsession with the idea that we're all going to freeze to death in blizzards continues unabated, despite the change of year).  Why do we keep trying to kid ourselves that the advent of a new year represents some kind of clean break with the past, despite all the evidence to the contrary?  Once we've gotten over the hangovers, everything carries on just as before.  Work certainly does.  Although, I have to say, after all the stress I had over Christmas, (roof update: still not repaired, looking for new roofer), it was something of a relief to get back to the mundane predictability of the workplace. 

At least this new year we seemed to avoid all the usual bollocks in the media about new year's resolutions and how we should all turn over a new leaf, drink less, eat more healthily and take more exercise.  Or maybe I just didn't see those TV programmes this time around, (which is possible as I've been spending a lot of time catching up with old movies of dubious quality on You Tube).  Anyway, as ever, I have no intention of making any resolutions, but I do have some tentative plans for online projects over the next few months.  I've been mulling over a new video-based series for this blog, (I've also finally edited together the last of my holiday films from last Summer and once I've sorted out a soundtrack, I'll be posting it here).  It would also be nice to finally get my own podcasts back on track, (although I've abandoned The Sleazecast since the Summer, I have been contributing to other people's podcasts).  Apart from all that, I have, of course, got a whole slate of new stories planned for The Sleaze.  So, it's business as usual in 2014.

Blue Sky Thinking

It's amazing the difference a few days can make.  Last time I posted here, back on Tuesday evening, the cold and gloomy weather had got to me - I was feeling pretty down, on top of what seemed like days of overcast skies, I'd had a pretty lousy day at work.  I was seriously considering posting something extremely depressing that would encapsulate my mood of utter despair.  Thankfully, at the last minute, I changed my mind and wrote some toss about John Major, instead.  Then Wednesday dawned with clear skies and sunshine.  I learned a long time ago that the best cure for the kind of seasonal low-level depression I'd felt settling in over the past few days, it is a blast of sunlight.  Not only does it lift my spirits, banishing dark thoughts and preoccupations, but it also sees off the physical manifestations of depression: the aches, pains and physical exhaustion that plague me during these bouts.

So, with my batteries recharged by a couple of days of wintry sunshine, I can look to the future again - where the most pressing issue is coming up with a suitably seasonally themed story for The Sleaze this Christmas.  Over the past thirteen years I've come up with all manner of variations on Christmas satire stories, usually involving Santa Claus being involved in some unseasonal activities.  To be honest, I often wonder why I bother, as such stories rarely do that well in traffic terms, (that said, last year's Cult of The Christmas Cock, a rare non-Santa story, did OK), partly due to their relatively small 'window of topicality'.  However, I also think that you can't afford to ignore major seasonal events altogether - I feel it gives readers the impression that the site is on 'autopilot', with stories written months in advance and published on a strict schedule, rather than reflecting actual events in the real world.  But getting back to the matter in hand, I've had a couple of ideas for this year's Christmas story, neither of them exactly earth-shattering, but they do at least tie into other topical events, so we'll see what develops.  In the meantime, long may those skies remain clear!

All Streamed Up

You may have noticed that there have been some changes around here.  Namely the 'Streampad' bar which now appears at the bottom of the page.  Until Sunday I was using Yahoo's Web Player application to stream all the episodes of 'The Sleazecast' currently posted on this blog.  This was a really neat and unobtrusive way of streaming media (it manifested itself as that grey tab which appeared on the left edge of the page).  Unfortunately, with virtually no warning, Yahoo decided to discontinue it.  So, as of Monday, there was no easy way for visitors to listen to our podcasts.   As I quickly found, there simply isn't anything out there which performs the same tasks in the way as Yahoo's Web Player.  Most media players require their code to be embedded individually for each post that includes audio.  Which is cumbersome and tedious beyond words.  However, I eventually stumbled across Streampad  which does almost the same thing.  It's more obtrusive and far less versatile than Yahoo Web Player, but right now it is all I've got!  That said, as it doesn't appear to have been updated since 2009 and seems to be affiliated with AOL, I have grave doubts that it will last much longer than Yahoo Web Player.  But hopefully it will be around long enough for me to find a more permanent solution.

All of which brings us to the thorny issue of the much delayed next instalment of 'The Sleazecast', which was promised for May, but somehow never materialised.  I had every intention of putting together this missing episode, but somehow it never happened.  In part this was down to the fact that the new-style 'Sleazecast', which debuted with episode thirteen, is just so time-consuming to produce - I'm afraid that there have simply been too many other things competing for my time for to justify devoting large chunks of it to an audio project.  Coupled to that has been a complete lack of inspiration.  I thought that I had ideas for a new episode but, upon closer examination, I ended up rejecting most of them.  However, I've recently started recording segments for the next episode and I've had some more, better, ideas.  I've also made a decision to drop out of another ongoing project I thought that I was contributing to, but recent events have made it clear that I'm basically a spare wheel there.  Instead, I've decided to focus on my own projects for the foreseeable future.  tarting with that delayed episode of 'The Sleazecast'.