As we rapidly approach the 13th anniversary of me owning jemjabella.co.uk and my 15th year of blogging, I can’t help but think about how blogging (both my own, and on a wider scale) has changed over the years. 15 years ago it wasn’t uncommon for people to write blog posts thousands of words long. Blogs… read full entry »

* sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I opened my work inbox first thing to a panicked email from a client (Sutton Community Farm) labelled “URGENT” – their website had gone down (again) with a Resource Limit Reached error. I quickly shot off a reply to let them know that this was usually caused by… read full entry »

I’ve been trawling the Way Back Machine lately for links & images for my recently re-added geek t-shirts collection page (work in progress), and happened upon a link to a page I used to have: “My Internet History”. I don’t have this page any more, it was one of the things I dropped when I… read full entry »

Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem… read full entry »

I know, bet you didn’t see that title coming? Seriously though, at this time of year, one of my most common search results relates to the common cold and testicles. The reason why — and the most popular result in el Goog — is a pisstake entry I posted in 2006 about someone defacing the… read full entry »

If you weren’t convinced by my 5 reasons NOT to go self-hosted with your blog post, or indeed need a little shove to the world of self-hosting, here are my 5 reasons to go self-hosted with your blog: 1. Your service provider is unlikely to just close, taking down your data Although I’m not suggesting… read full entry »

I’ve seen a lot of fuss over the past month or so about (parent) bloggers who ‘have’ to go from a WordPress.com or Blogger account to a self-hosted blog. As a web developer, it’s obviously in my best interest for there to be lots of self-hosted blogs and sites out there because ultimately it means… read full entry »

I’ve been bending Karl’s ear recently about my laptop. After posting not so long ago on Snark about how it was just fine for a near-7-year-old laptop, I think I must have jinxed it. Suddenly it was creaking at the seams, not coping with what I was throwing at it. Of course, now I’m actually… read full entry »

One of the things I see other people fall into the trap of too often with this budgeting lark (no, not me, far too smart.. cough cough) is buying into false economies. In other words, investing in something that appears to be a bargain but doesn’t really benefit or save money in the long run…. read full entry »

I know when cold and flu season is approaching for one rather unique reason… Hits to a rather, er.. “interesting” old post of mine fly through the roof. I have to say, if men suffer from sore testicles when they get a cold, it’s no wonder they moan so much. I can’t imagine that’s much… read full entry »