On the other hand, posts can quite often be significantly shorter than the signatures, and it can be difficult to follow a discussion.

Paul Silver and I had both been thinking about this, and thought that a grey signature might be the answer. Paul knocked up the solution in no time at all.

If you’d like grey signatures on your Vanilla Forum, it’s dead easy to do:

Find the file /plugins/Signatures/design/signature.css

Under .UserSignature {

Add:
color: #999999;

And that will turn the text in the signature area grey.

This graphic shows one reason why you need to pick your way carefully through the social media quagmire.

This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-marketing-landscape-complicated-2012-5#ixzz1vWbk5CVQ

On 13 May, the Spam-free WordPress Plug-in stopped working here, and I found nearly 1500 spam comments distributed throughout Dangerous Thinking that had to be deleted.

I don’t know what’s up with Spam-free WordPress. I don’t trust it any more, so I don’t really care. I’ve gone back to Akismet. The odd spam getting through is better than 1500 in a week!

Today, looking at the sugary/carby stuff, I’ve been pigging out on a bacon, sausage, eggy bread and maple syrup breakfast, chips at lunchtime, a slice of cake mid-afternoon and some M&Ms along the way.

I thought I’d check my blood sugar level to see how far off track I’d gone.

Not even a little. The figure is a low 4.2. Fantastic!

About a week on, and one binge day past, I’m finding no problem at all keeping my blood sugar level between 5 and 7 – even on the binge day and the day afterwards.

This is great. Now I can focus on losing some weight, feeling great in myself.

After more than a year working with my diabetes nurse and GP to get my medication right, I ended up on one Gliclazide tablet a day and three Metformins. That’s not far off needing to inject Insulin, some have said.

One of my goals for 2012 was to become purely diet-controlled, that is, come off all diabetes medication.

Some form of low carbohydrate diet makes a lot of sense for diabetics, and being a borderline geek, I decided to give Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb diet in his book The Four-Hour Body a go.

In less than three weeks, I’ve been able to come off all my diabetes medication, after my blood sugar levels have plummeted.

Time for celebration, I think. Thanks Tim!

It’s some time since I worked out how to display ads on Vanilla, but although we’ve tried different types of Amazon ads in different places on the site, we’ve seen little click-through and no sales. I think there are some reasons why this is the case.

On the face of it, there’s a great synergy between some of Amazon’s product ranges and what we as hi-fi and music enthusiasts buy – CDs, records and data storage, for a start.

Wouldn’t it be great if Amazon’s ads reflected the music we’ve mentioned in our discussions? If we discuss a Van Morrison album, for example, why can’t Amazon show ads for the specific album we’ve mentioned and/or a link to the artist’s page where all available albums in different formats are listed?

No such thing happened.

The special offers being shown yesterday were about half the same as were being shown at the start. You’d think they only stocked about 50 CDs, with about 10 on special!

So earlier today, I installed AdSense. Over just a few hours, Google seems to have figured out what the site is about, and is successfully showing different ads on different pages. And, most critically, the ads seem relevant and are changing.

You can see which of the two has invested in their ad platform.

I don’t know yet if we’ll make any money from AdSense – I know Audio Chews won’t get rich – but the aim is only to move to better hosting, in the first place.

I chose Wu Wei by Jeff Ngan as a canny balance between clean minimalism and allowing me to cram in all the baggage that comes with the ever-evolving behemoth that is Dangerous Thinking.

I hope I’ve finished making small tweaks to the site. So it’s over to you. Drop me a comment if there’s something not working for you.

Fantastic images.