First Page Result on Google in 5 Days!

screen shot of google search placing for writers q and aThis is a genuine screen shot of the first page of results showing it in 2nd place.

Out of curiosity I searched for the phrase writers q & a on Google.com yesterday. (Tuesday November 10th 2010). This is the writers.im domain I had registered on Friday 5th November 2010 and setup Q2A over the weekend. Depending on which PC or iPhone I look on, it ranges from 1st to 9th (i.e. on the first page) out of 17 million.

Try it yourself- search on Google (or just click writers q and a).

Of course realistically it doesn’t matter where it comes in search results if those results aren’t what people are searching for. For instance if I search Google for writers then http://writers.im does not appear in the first ten pages. I wasn’t expecting it to. I was just amazed that a new domain/website could get a very high search result in 5 days especially for a .im domain.

Writers.im – Any questions?

Continuing in a very creative mood, I’ve today setup Writers Q & A, a website for people to post questions and answers on writing and writers. The intention is to have something similar to the programmers Q & A website stackoverflow.com, but for writers.

Although I’m a part time technical writer on About.com, I’ve dabbled with fiction (and sci-fi) writing over the years and really want to develop it more; it’s an itch i have to scratch but it’s in my metaphorical back where I can’t reach it. Writers.im is a small step towards that goal. I figure if I give a little I get a little! So it’s completely free, no ads. It’s an experiment which if it fails costs me very little.

I’m a bit Tied Up

Thanks to ShoeString Laces Ltd for a very fast turnround. I ordered two pairs of shoelaces on Thursday and they arrived today. If you need shoelaces, I recommended them. From a happy customer!

I write like Cory Doctorow

That is according to iwl.me. A free site, it let’s you paste or type in a block of text and then analyses it to see whose writing style it closest resembles. I tried it twice, posting two different longish blocks from this blog. The first time I was like er Dan Brown ( I wish, Kerching!) The second time I got Cory Doctorow, a slightly less well known Sci-Fi author who is a nice guy; he has replied to some of my emails in the past. Oddly enough he didn’t send me any money but that’s likely because I didn’t ask.

Who knows, he says “Tonight Mathew I could be Chekhov” if I adopt a new writing style. Or donning my programming hat, I could be Markov Chain whose elegant if idiotic and meaningless phrases have helped spammers bypass a million filters.

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

iPhone 3G Battery Weirdness

Before getting an iPhone 4 I upgraded my 3G to IOS 4 and used it for several weeks and noticed that sometimes when charging it, the battery indicator didn’t update, even after a couple of hours or all night. This seems to happen when charging from the mains.

It’s either a bug with the IOS 4 software particular to 3G or there’s something not right between chargers.

How to Correct the Indicator
(1) Reset the iPhone. i.e. hold both buttons down until the “slide to power off” swipe appears and then switch it off and restart.

or

(2) Plug it into a Computer with iTunes and charge it.

New Software and Books

A big day for new software. I’m now running Office 2010 at home and in conjunction with a paid subscription iPhone/iPad App ($15 a year) called MobileNoter I can now synchonise Office 2010 OneNote notes with my iPhone/iPad. This looks very well done, it all worked smoothly (apart from the Wifi Access- I’m not sure why as my Windows Forewall is open and the iPhone picked up the Pc’s name and the Bonjour service is running) but currently it won’t synch over Wifi. It’s not that important as it syncs over the Cloud service.

Apple still I think have a problem in recognising that people do want to do some work on the iPhone/iPad and that the methods for copying stuff to PCs/Macs in a word suck mega bigtime. Unless you have DropBox, you need to send emails or sync via iTunes. So other solutions like MobileNoter have stepped in but they shouldn’t have to really…

Also my friends at Packt Publishing are sending me “Flash 10 Multiplayer Game Essentials” to review so that will appear on David Bolton in a week or two. As it’s Flash, I couldn’t really review it on my About C,C++ and C# column. Creating multi-player games is my current non-work interest (and writing for About)

ID Cards- Why Do We Need them?

I saw an article on the Home Office website about why we need them, the truth is we don’t (or the National Identity Register either) so I wrote an article about Why we need ID cards – We don’t. The idea is to try and knock the Home Office article off the top spot for the phrase why do we need id cards. Feel free to link to my article, if you do please include that phrase in the link.

This is the linking html you can use.

Why we need ID cards

NO2ID - Stop ID cards and the database state

Much Better Spirit of Christmas!

Central Line Tube Santa giving away Quality Street sweetsComing home on the Central Line today around 2.00 pm and this nice bloke was giving away Quality Street sweets on the tube. No catch, no charge, just a gesture of good will at Christmas.

I had a sweet and took his photo. Sir I salute you! Merry Christmas!

English- as she is Bespoken!


This at least made me chuckle, also in Canary Wharf. (Hey I work there!). The sentence in capitals on the white banner. “Allegra will be signing books bespokely”! She looks quite cute but I bet she is bespoken for…