Blazing Minds

A Trip to Glan Clwyd Hospital and a Long, Long Wait!

Karen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:09:11 +0000

Those of you who follow my Twitter (@RemBeatZ) may of noticed that last night I was twitting from Glan Clwyd Hospital with updates on what was happening, so how did it all start?

Yesterday I took my wonderful mum out for the day to Llandudno for a shopping trip, but, shortly after arriving she developed some extremely painful chest pains, so, without further ado I got her in my car, got on to the A55 and got her to Glan Clwyd Hospital which was around 3pm, I then returned home to get her some overnight stuff for her.

After tea, myself and my good friend went to the hospital to drop her stuff off, only to be told that she may be able to go home, great, I thought, this was at about 7pm.

One hour later we were then told that she should have had an x-ray, so we would have to wait for them to take her down to x-ray, another hour went by and we were still waiting for someone to wheel her down to the x-ray department, after yet another hour, someone finally came and took her down to x-ray.

Half an hour later she was back up from x-ray and then told to wait for a doctor to let her know how the x-ray came out! Then after half an hour a nurse popped her head around the curtain to let us know that she could now go home as she was given the all clear, finally!

At 11pm we were finally on the way out the hospital and on the way to the local Chinese take-away in Rhuddlan for something to eat.

I just can’t believe how long it took just to go in, take a blood test, check her blood pressure and have an x-ray! And they moan in the hospitals that there are not enough beds!!!!

Getting your niche followers on Twitter with TwittGeek

Karen — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:23:27 +0000

If you are looking for followers on twitter who possible have the same interests as you do, then you can’t go wrong with TwittGeek.

TwittGeek is a “Twitter white listed” application that will follow 200 twitters a day with your chosen keywords, so simply sign in via the Twitter Oauth and then add your keywords after which TwittGeek will search and add 200 followers for you.

You are limited to 200 per day and if you try to follow anymore TwittGeek will tell you to what until tomorrow to follow anymore. So you can’t be accused of spamming..

I have used TwittGeek myself and it has proven a good Twitter Tool, and a high percentage of the followers have followed back, it can take a while to run as a five second wait between each add, but this is probably a anti-flooding feature, so I would recommend TwittGeek, but as with all Twitter Tools, don’t abuse them, it is still nice to gain followers the old fashioned way

Proud to announce my friendship chain award

Karen — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:33:20 +0000

The other day I had an email from my friend George Serradinho at serradinho.com who has awarded me the friendship chain award

So I’m tagging some of the new blogs I’m reading..

— Begin Copy —

This is the easy way and the fastest way to :

Make your Authority Technorati explode.
Increase your Google Page Rank.
Get more traffic to your blog.
Makes more new friends.

Rules:

Start copy from “Begin Copy” until “End Copy” to your blog.
Put your own blog name and link.
Tag your friends as much as you can.

1. Picturing of Life 2. Juliana’s Site 3. Hazel-My Life, My Hope, My Future 4. Jeanne-The Callalily Space 5.My Family is my Life 6. The Simple Life of a Baghag 7. On A Wonderful Day Like Today 8. House Everything 9. The Creativity in Me 10. Travel and Photography 11. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 12. You Are My Sunshine 13. Song to Remember 14. Super Blog 15. Philiippine Tv Marathon 16. Simply Blue 17. Breaking the Boundaries 18. Top Five 19. A Simple Life 20. Simple Happy Life 21. A Great Pleasure 22. Glossa~licious 23. Times Goes By 24. Empty Streets 1027 25. Serradinho 26. Blazing Minds 27. Your Site Here xoxo

— End Copy —

So if your on the list, then take a little time to post about it and spread it amongst your friends

How to unfollow non tweeting tweeters on Twitter

Karen — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:24:59 +0000

Now there comes a time when you may have a some Twitters that you follow that haven’t posted for ages, I don’t mean a week or two I mean maybe longer than a month, so how do you weed them out and unfollow them! Well, you use UnTweeps to cleanup your Twitter and remove those that haven’t posted recently.

Using UnTweeps is simple, just enter your Twitter details, or if like me you prefer not to enter your password you can use the Twitter Oauth system.

Then you can simple select from the drop down menu how you would like to search for your non twitters, either 30, 60 or 90 days, then hit “List Stale Tweets” it’s that simple.

Once you hit the button UnTweeps will search through your friends to find out who is “Stale” then it is up to you to select from the list who you would like to revove and who to keep.

So if you are not sure if someone is taking up your twitter friends, who hasn’t posted for ages then UnTweeps is certainly the thing to use, I do use it myself and find it a valuable Twitter Tool to keep my tweets fresh.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, twitter websites, twitter tools

Firefox 3.5 is now out and ready to download. But Wait!

Karen — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:57:04 +0000

So the other day I noticed that my FireFox was letting me know that V3.5 was ready to download and upgrade, great I thought the next version which had been promised to be faster that previous incarnations of the browser.

Without any hesitation I updated my Firefox to 3.5 and found several thing straight away!

For starters a few plugin that I use were not compatible with 3.5 and were disabled, not too much of a fuss as there were only two that wouldn’t work one was the Microsoft .NET framework assistant and the other was the EntreCard Toolbar, now the toolbar is something that I do use, so not been able to use it has caused a drop in my EC, but I’ve had to resort to the original method of dropping, for now anyway.

The other thing I noticed after running Firefox 3.5 for the first time is that it’s faster, not turbo fast, but as least twice as fast as the earlier version which has made my browsing that bit faster.

So here’s a run down from the Firefox site on what’s new:

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the earlier version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)

Support for the HTML5 and elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)

Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.

Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)

Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage,

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

So far everything is running great, I have noticed an increase in speed on sites that I used to visit and this is great, if your not too fussy about your plugin and can wait for the updates to arrive then I would recommend updating now, if you are concerned with your plugins, then just give it a little longer and then upgrade, by which time those plugin should have upgrade

Saturday Six – Social Networks

Karen — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:14:46 +0000

Greetings readers, yes it’s time for this weeks Saturday Six and this weeks topic is Social Networks. Many of us use the social networks to promote our blogs/websites and even other websites we may be visiting, as usually you can post your answers here or on your blog with a link back to this weeks Saturday Six. So here we go…

What are your top six Social Networks that you use?

Ok, that’s it, thanks for taking part and I’m looking forward to everyone’s answers. Don’t forget to hit the “ReTweet” button to ReTweet this weeks Saturday Six.

Anyone using Twitter can be part of the process by tweeting me a topic, I will then pick one randomly and the chosen topic will be used and the tweeter will have a DoFollow link to their website or blog as a thank you.

If you would like to nominate a topic then simply tweet me @RemBeatZ with your nominated topic and the hash tag #Sat6

Also if you take part in the Saturday Six you can join the Saturday Six Twibe.. And don’t forget to vote for me at my interview at BlogInterviewer.

After the sunshine comes the rain!

Karen — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:19:58 +0000

Well after a good week of fantastic weather it was inevitable that the rain would finally arrive!

But even though we have had some slight showers today, the sun has decided to come back out again, it all kinds of reminds me of the track Mr Blue Sky by ELO

Anyhow, I took the opportunity to take some macro shots today of some rain drops on the petals of some flowers, which I have uploaded to Flickr, so for your enjoyment here they are

So there you have it …. Hope you like them.

EntreCard to take action against bounce rates!

Karen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:20:55 +0000

Now many users of the EntreCard system have said that is a long time coming, but according to the latest blog post on the EntreCard blog they are to “take action against bounce rates”

So before I get on to this, I’ll just give you a quick bit of info about bounce rates, a Bounce Rate is when a visitor lands on your blog and then leaves straight away without spending time looking around your blog and EntreCard is a terrible culprit for making you have a high percentage on your bounce rates….

So as mentioned by EntreCard they intend to implement a system that will decide if the dropper is a “drop and run” visitor, this is someone who is only there to drop on your ECard and then zip off to another blog, to get in as many drops as they can in the day without even reading your blog, shame on them! As mentioned in the EntreCard Blog:

Up until now, we’ve always allowed the “drop and run” phenomenon to take place. We figured if someone was interesting to the visitor, they’d stop and read, and it was best to let everyone go at their own pace. But now we are taking a slightly different approach, in an ongoing effort to increase the quality of Entrecard traffic across the board.

My problem with the drop and run phenomenon is that you are spending time writing an interesting post only for someone to stop by, drop on the ECard and bugger off! I write these posts not just for me you know but for others to read and show some interest by posting comments, not visit and say, “ok I’ve dropped, I’m off!”

So what will EntreCard be doing about this, well this is what they have said on their official blog:

Starting soon, “dropping and running” will no longer give you credit. We are developing a proprietary algorithm to determine whether or not you engaged in the blog you visitied in some way. If you did not engage in the blog, you will not get credit. We won’t be disclosing exactly the algorithm we use, so that people can’t game it easily.

So it seems that something is been done, but will this cut the amount of view to a blog showing the EntreCard widget? Probably, but isn’t it better to get a few less visits and gain visitors that actually appreciate your blogging, only time will tell when the new system is finally implemented.

Why I’ve started using Twittley instead of Tweetmeme

Karen — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:10:48 +0000

Many of you reading this humble blog of mine may have noticed that the TweetMeme button has been replaced with the Twittley button!

This is thanks to some interesting posts that I have recently read, the first was by DragonBlogger “Reasons Why Twittley is Better than Tweetmeme for Wordpress” about the weight that Twittley places on the person making the [tag]tweets[tag], which then lead me to the post by Tycoon Blogger “Twittley is better than Tweetmeme” which really gave me the incentive to change, I recommend checking out both posts and then make up your own minds

Technorati Tags: Twittley button, Wordpress plugins, twitter wordpress plugins, twittley, tweetmeme

UK Heatwave to Break Temperature Records!

Karen — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:18:45 +0000

It’s time to slap on the sun lotion as soon as you can if your living or visiting our little island this week as we prepare for a heatwave to hit the country.

It’s been forecasted that this week could break all the records over the years with temperatures hitting 30°C (86°F) in the middle of the week, which would make it the hottest spell for years!

But despite all this the forecasters have also said that this will not be a solid wall of sunshine as it will be broken up by the odd thundery downpours, it will also feel humid and the pollen counts will rise, which is just what us hay fever sufferers need!

The Bookmakers Ladbrokes is offering odds of 8/1 that Wales beats its top temperature of 35.2C, and 17/2 that Scotland tops 32.9C or Northern Ireland exceeds 30.8C.

Ladbrokes have also set 13/2 that the top temperature midweek will hit 32°C (91.4°F).

I know that our back garden here in North Wales has hit 29.4°C (84.9°F) which has felt a little cooler by a nice coastal breeze, but it’s still hot and it’s lovely, but have we got this hot spell for a short time, will it disappear next week and return to rain, rain and more rain. We will se but I’m personally hoping for a good run of warm weather, yes the odd shower would be nice to cool everything down at night, but the warm spell would perfect for BBQs and garden lounging

Blazing Minds

A Trip to Glan Clwyd Hospital and a Long, Long Wait!

Related Reading

Getting your niche followers on Twitter with TwittGeek

Related Reading

Proud to announce my friendship chain award

Related Reading

How to unfollow non tweeting tweeters on Twitter

Related Reading

Firefox 3.5 is now out and ready to download. But Wait!

Related Reading

Saturday Six – Social Networks

Related Reading

After the sunshine comes the rain!

Related Reading

EntreCard to take action against bounce rates!

Related Reading

Why I’ve started using Twittley instead of Tweetmeme

Related Reading

UK Heatwave to Break Temperature Records!

Related Reading