jemjabella

These are the parents of the next generation

I am seriously without words at the moment at the way some people choose to parent. I thought forcing early weaning was bad enough, but then I found this thread...

I wont let her grnadparent put pillows behind her when she is sat on the floor saying "the more she falls the sooner she'll learn" I am the meanest mummy. lef ther on the sofa with a toy the other day as i was stay on the floor and she face planted the floor.

I laughed at her when she was crying and it made her cry even more which made me laugh harder. they are just so pathetic sometime you have to laugh.

opened the cupboard door on to her head, she wasnt bothered.

ignored amelie coughing when she was poorley only to go up 5 minutes later (on the demand of my OH) and find her asleep in a pool of her own sick. she was more annoyed at being woken up and dunked in the bath.

And...

Sometimes when Rhys crys i just laugh so much, i cant help it, its his pouty bottom lip! My mum always says im being cruel and blah blah blah but its funny.

Plus...

I also laughed at him when he got his head stuck in the tv unit, and he once fell backwards off my bed while I was sat doing my makeup!!

Forced feeding...

Jenni, Iv been a bit impatient and tried to give him some food on a spoon and hes refused it, so iv been a bit more forceful and then realised i hadnt checked the temperature and it was really hot! Oooops!

Anything to cheer her up...

Gave him a massive spoonful of Ice cream, so i could see him get Brain Freeze Embarassed

I was feeling so down,lol!!

Sick, sick bitches. I wish that BC didn't have an "anti-personal attack rule" because I'd let them in on a few home truths.

On Tumblelogs and Why I Love Habari

For at least 4-5 years I've been desperate to turn my blog into a sort of "tumblelog"; that is, a blog that consists of multiple content types that you can easily update with more than just full on text entries. The problem is, at first I lacked the know-how to achieve it — my early blog/CMS was far too primitive and would have been virtually impossible to easily update — and then I flicked back and forth with WordPress which would have required intensive hacking about of an already bloated system.

A few years ago Tumblr came along, providing the theoretical answer to all my prayers... except 3rd party services and I don't get along. I don't trust other people to look after my data. (This is why I don't post anything meaningful to twitter, incidentally.)

Fast-forward to a few months ago, and I was chatting about life streams, tumblelogs, updating websites to the girls on IRC and turns out I wasn't the only one with this goal in mind. Furthermore, as I've converted a few people to Habari lately, we were all singing from the same hymn sheet (what a daft phrase) in terms of CMS, making it easier to come up with a solution that would work for us all.

As it happens, Habari has a content types plugin — created and maintained by the Habari Community, so I know it's secure — which allows me to create custom content types on my blog to allow me to easily post photos, quotes etc with their own styling. Because of Habari's fantastic, simple theming system it's a piece of piss to make it do different things with different post types (no messing with complex PHP, it's as easy as creating a .php file!) This is why I love Habari.

How to Make Money Off Gullible Fools

I've just been checking my Facebook activity feed and noticed a friend who'd "Like"ed a page called "This Formspring Question led to the SUICIDE of a 15-year-old girl". It's one of those annoying "click Like to see the content!" pages, which makes use of CSS to hide the content (pro-tip: the web developer toolbar for Firefox has an option to disable styles; scroll down to see the content).

The page hides a link to an external page with the supposed formspring question on it. Now, ignoring the stupidity of clicking links to websites you don't trust, within seconds of the page loading I was redirected to an 'Adscend Media' page telling me I *must* enable JavaScript to see the content, X browsers support it, etc etc. Odd, I don't remember clicking an Adscend Media page, I wanted to see this so-called cyberbullying! So, back-up a second, reload the content, view-source before the refresh kicks in (web dev toolbar also disables those, btw) and lo and behold... amongst the hideous bloated mark-up that can only be generated by a Microsoft Office product, is a JavaScript reference to Adscend Media. An external JavaScript file which loads an ad-ridden affiliate iframe onto the page.

When you click "Like" to "bring exposure to cyberbullying", you're promoting a page that is making money through the stupidity of Facebook users who don't know any better than to click links to 3rd party pages. The fact that this page, and others like it, only have dodgy adverts is a small mercy... think about what you could be loading on to your computer by opening pages you don't know and can't trust. Nice, eh?

Happy 1000th entry, and 8 years too!

I was just gearing up to write an entry on the best of jemjabella as it's 8 years since it was created on the 29th, so I logged into my dashboard and saw that I'd written 999 entries, making this number 1000!

Strictly speaking there's been many, many more than that. For starters, my early blogging days were not blessed by a content management system and thus are in an archive of html files somewhere. Next, there's the small matter of 2 hackings back in the day, and 2 lots of me deleting the wrong database and losing everything. Yes, my l33t skills weren't always this l33t.

Anyway, on with the show... here's my top 10 posts from over the years (in no particular order):

1. In Which I Poke Fun at Apple — I find it hard not to be smug about the fact that Apple isn't as perfect as the fanbois make out. >:D
2. A Real Example of a Bad Web Developer — in which I pwn a grown man, which results in him removing his website from the interwebs.
3. I'm a Woman, Actually — PMT at its finest. ;)
4. Don't Blame CSS for Your Incompetence — in which I pwn several grown men with my l33t CSS knowledge. I sense a theme occurring here...
5. PHP Includes Aren't What You Think — this needs re-iterating. Apparently people still think that include() is the be-all and end-all.
6. My StumbleUpon Beating — because I'll probably never again get over 20,000 unique hits in 24 hours :( Plus, that made me over £60 in referrals. :D
7. Making Bold Claims The Wrong Way — Mallory cleared the air with me a while back, and I don't hold any sort of grudge against her (or anyone that fucks me off... too little time, too much to do) but I have to LOL at myself because of the lengths I went to, to prove my point.
8. Proper HTML Like Wot I Does — lmfao. There's no other words.
9. Quick and Easy Lunch Ideas? — this is a boring-ass post like whoa, but it brings me shitloads of hits. One day I'll do something useful with it.
10. Pants: Swimchick.net — it had to be in there. Jessica was the only person who ever accepted her award and we're cool with each other, but this post STILL gets her rabid fans all of a fluster. I hope she finds it as funny as I do.

Shit, that was more difficult than I thought it would be. I'm not sure if it's a measure of my awesomeness that there were more than 10 posts I thought rocked, or just an indication that I talk too much? Don't answer that. ;)

Any memorable posts stick out in your mind from over the years?

Green Fingers

As I'm not chucking my ring up every hour or so this year, I started off sowing seeds a few weeks ago. I've got tomatoes, courgette (zucchini) and peppers planted, although made the mistake of putting the pepper seeds direct into a trough outside, and now we've had some cold nights so might have to re-sow. I'm hoping that because nothing is above the soil level yet they may be OK.

Anyway, pics or it didn't happen, right? ;)

I'm the next Alan Titchmarsh, clearly.